


This Bed of Shattered Bone

by deadendtracks (amonitrate)



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Anxiety, Betrayal, Biblical Allusions (Abrahamic Religions), Canon-Typical Violence, Delusions, Drinking, Drinking to Cope, Eating Disorders, Emetophobia, Fever, Hallucinations, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Medical Trauma, Medicinal Drug Use, Mental Breakdown, Mentions of Cancer, Panic Attacks, Period Typical Attitudes, Physical Disability, Post-Betrayal, Post-Season/Series 05, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Smoking, Speech Disorders, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Withdrawal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 08:17:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 87,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22338976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/deadendtracks
Summary: If he was still unclear on what precisely had transpired between Oswald Mosley’s skull remaining intact and Tommy Shelby statue-still in the armchair in his sitting room, well, Alfie was reasonably certain that sequence of events weren’t much clearer to Tommy himself.A journey through the afterlife, otherwise known as Margate.
Relationships: Ada Shelby & Tommy Shelby, Polly Gray & Tommy Shelby, Tommy Shelby & Alfie Solomons, Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons, Tommy Shelby/Lizzie Stark
Comments: 355
Kudos: 398





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the [playlist on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4tlKJtoiusCaa8WfAoqdn2) if you're interested!
> 
> I've warned for everything I can think of, let me know if I've forgotten anything. Additional warnings may be added as the story is posted if necessary.
> 
> I'm a bit nervous about this one, I've been working on it for months and I'm breaking my own self-imposed rules about starting to post before I'm finished writing, but here goes.
> 
> Thanks as always to Veneredirimmel.

Please note I do not consent to have my work hosted on or accessed by any third party app or site. If you are seeing this fanfiction anywhere but archiveofourown it has been reposted or accessed without my permission. Please be aware that I am strongly against this type of app -- especially those that seek to profit through subscriptions and ads -- and ask that you access my fic directly via AO3 in the future. I am including this message in the body of the text because apparently these apps strip out notes.

* * *

* * *

> _my silences are the ocean_
> 
> _that carries ships and also crushes them. _
> 
> \--Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet

Never’d been a man of many words, Tommy Shelby, but these days he was a man of no words at all. Or very nearly none, right, there was still the occasional No or the rarer, clipped Yeah. Alfie’d learnt the trick to it early on: anything requiring an actual response would get him nothing, nowhere, nyet, but he could sometimes provoke _something_ when the choice was forced between No and Yeah.

Didn’t stop Alfie from speaking _his_ usual ration of words -- if you didn’t make use of ‘em there were obvious consequences, right, you clearly lost ‘em, maybe for good, and that wasn’t a thing he was about to let happen to himself, now, was it -- but the most his queries of a philosophical or theoretical sort inspired from his unexpected and apparently long-term houseguest was the occasional short Hmm.

Yeah, Tommy saved his words for his ghosts, and his ghosts for after dark. Most of the time. Didn’t speak to them when he knew Alfie was around to hear, right, but the ghosts was the only reason Alfie knew the man was still capable of vocalizing beyond No Yeah and Hmm.

Well, that weren’t quite right. Once, just once, he’d gotten another word out of Tommy. Two words, more like.

_Stop _had been one of them. The other had been _Please._

But that exception to the general rule weren’t something Alfie spent much time thinking much about, did he.

He’d just fucking shown up, Tommy had, weeks after his little plot had failed him, weeks after Alfie’d sat by the radio and heard Mosley’s fucking hate-mongering tirade break off, and it had been a relief, yeah, Alfie could admit that, a relief when the fucker’s speech had been stopped from reaching its evil conclusion. But no crack of the rifle had come, and the only news was of a riot in the audience, and then nothing at all. Nothing from Birmingham, then bog-standard reports of Caesar's smugly triumphant return to the House of Commons and nothing at all about his would-be Brutus. Not a peep.

Alfie could admit to being perturbed by that nothing. He’d even called the fucking heap of stones Tommy kept in Warwickshire, but realized the moment he’d heard the housekeeper’s tremulous tones that dead men don’t leave messages, do they, so he’d hung up the phone. Dead men didn’t write letters neither, but after a fortnight passed with no word Alfie’d sent a telegram that went unanswered. Tommy’d be in touch or he wouldn’t; it’d taken him three years to get round to it the last time. Alfie doubted he had another three years in him, but that was beside the point, yeah, and anyway, it’d only been a pair of months, hadn’t it. If he was still unclear on what precisely had transpired between Oswald Mosley’s skull remaining intact and Tommy Shelby statue-still in the armchair in his sitting room, well, Alfie was reasonably certain that sequence of events weren’t much clearer to Tommy himself.

It’d been one of his less profitable days, yeah, one in a seemingly endless schedule of forced leisure. He’d spent the morning wrapped in a blanket on the balcony, attempting to read and absorb what sunlight there was through his pores and ignore his nurse’s attempts to feed him pills. After succumbing to a lengthy cat nap on his couch, he’d startled awake for no reason -- or so he’d thought, why would there be a reason, this was fucking Margate wasn’t it, the only interruption he ever had that he hadn’t planned ahead of time himself came from the fucking gulls -- only to realize he was staring straight at Tommy Shelby, OBE. He’d blinked and thought himself caught in another one of them fucking dreams -- dreams which had stopped the night of Mosley’s speech, and that was a fact he hadn’t given any thought either -- but Tommy stayed where he was, back in the armchair he’d occupied on his first visit, apparently no apparition but rather solidly incarnate.

Tommy’d been contemplating the view beyond the shut balcony doors and didn’t move when Alfie sat up, or when the book he’d been reading prior to sleep’s ambush thunked to the floor. Didn’t even blink, but then, Tommy weren’t one for blinking much either. Probably thought it gave him some kind of advantage, that unbroken fucking stare, and Alfie could admit that it did have an impact if you weren’t vigilant about it, if you let it get to you.

So. Yeah. Tommy Shelby in his armchair, Tommy Shelby sitting like he was carved out of a single block of granite, grey in the face in the overcast afternoon light. He’d been wearing a suit that didn’t fit him properly, shirt open at the collar, and for a long moment Alfie had just sat there watching him, waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting for some reaction, he supposed, for Tommy to explain what the fuck he was doing there, maybe, for Tommy to tell him why Oswald Fucking Mosley still breathed London’s shitty air after Alfie’s own men had made the damnable trip to Birmingham for a pittance and pulled off their end of the bargain. But every fucking question he had seemed to have fled for higher ground, and all he was left with was the instinct to let them go, for the moment.

It took him longer than it should have to realize that Tommy wasn’t going to acknowledge him and another bit of time to notice that Tommy wasn’t smoking. That oddity was enough to push Alfie beyond his surprise.

“You having second thoughts about your continued custody of my dog?”

Tommy ignored him. Had finally blinked, though, a leisurely movement of the eyelids. Blinked a second time and then shut his eyes and didn’t open them again. Alfie hadn’t been unnerved quite yet, but he’d been on his way, heading in the general direction, right.

The nurse had picked that moment to poke her head into the room and she’d let out an exclamation, and that was when Alfie realized Tommy must’ve shown himself in.

“Oh, Mr. Solomons, I didn’t realize you had a guest.”

“That would make two of us, yeah,” Alfie’d said, a little annoyed, but more perturbed than anything. He could see Tommy’s waistcoat rising and falling under his jacket, so the man was still alive, but it was the only sign. It was February and though his ever-present cap was pulled low, Tommy wasn’t wearing an overcoat. Maybe he’d hung it up himself when he’d snuck past the nurse, but Alfie was beginning to suspect it unlikely.

“Shall I bring tea?” the nurse asked, still flustered. She looked to Alfie, who looked to Tommy, who sat facing the sea outside the balcony with his eyes shut against it.

“Alright, yeah, I suppose,” Alfie’d muttered finally. “Being as we’ve a guest and all.”

He sat forward, hands clasped between his knees. The suit didn’t fit, which was a first; Alfie couldn’t tell if the fault lie with the sudden loss of girth -- most visible in the spare planes of his face -- or a shockingly poor choice in tailor. “Or did you return to your roots and nick some other bloke’s threads, Thomas?” he’d said, not realizing he was going to speak aloud until he did. Tommy’s eyes opened and narrowed a little, like maybe he had thoughts about the matter.

If he did, he didn’t share them.

Tea arrived. Tea was poured out into two dainty teacups, teacups with proper saucers, with sugar cubes and them little silver spoons, laid out on a silver tray for the edification of his guest. There was even a pile of biscuits on a fancy porcelain plate. The nurse had started giving Tommy a wary eye when he persisted in refusing to take notice of her presence or the fine tea service she’d gone to some trouble to prepare. Serving tea was a bit outside her usual duties, but in a mutually beneficial arrangement Alfie paid double her advertised wages so he didn’t have to trouble himself with a maid. The nurse retreated, sending him a pressed-lip look as she went, like she had something she wanted to say. Whatever it was, she’d come out with it eventually, she always did, yeah. Had opinions, his nurse, extensive opinions, and a somewhat captive audience to try them out on.

“Only one of us in this room is dead, mate,” Alfie said, after the nurse’s footsteps fell to silence.

It got him some movement, that. A reaction. Tommy’s attention left the balcony to drift over the odds and ends and miscellania of the sitting room as if he hadn’t seen them before, eventually settling somewhere in the empty air just to left of the ruined half of Alfie’s face. Right, then. It was something. Alfie lifted his teacup and took a sip. He was nearly convinced by now that this wasn’t strategy, whatever was happening here. If he was reading the situation accurately. If.

“Have you renounced all liquids, Tommy, or is it only tea which offends you?”

Tommy blinked. His jaw worked a bit. Aside from the newly rawboned countenance, he was unmarked, Tommy was, as far as Alfie could see, but held himself in the chair as if sitting upright took all his considerable effort. Alfie half expected his nose to start streaming red the way it had in the middle of their first parlay, but no blood was forthcoming. Nothing much was forthcoming. Alfie still wasn’t to the point of fully unnerved -- took a lot more than a stubbornly uncommunicative Midlands gangster with aspirations to political office and public assassination to do that -- but even Tommy wasn’t typically this remote. Even when he was refusing you the pleasure of his direct eye contact, Tommy Shelby never let you forget he was tracking every fucking nuance of every single thing you said and did and keeping a running account of what it all meant for the ceaseless clockwork of his scheming.

“Whiskey, then? Don’t keep shit in the way of spirits in this house, but being an honorable host I could send out for--”

“No,” Tommy said then, as if it was any kind of answer to anything. He didn’t touch the teacup the nurse had left on the table at his elbow, and after the word was spoken it vanished into the ether like it hadn’t happened at all.

“No to the whiskey, or no to the possibly seditious rejection of our national beverage? You are still a British citizen, yeah? One would think tea-drinking a requirement of the office of MP, for political purposes.”

A dark line appeared between Tommy’s brows. He blinked once, twice, and then his focus floated away from Alfie again, back to the balcony doors.

Right.

“Me own mum weren’t a citizen,” Alfie said, one final attempt at conversation, “but that never prevented her from enjoying a proper cup of tea, right, though never in china this fine. She brought this out special, Marie, because she wants to encourage houseguests. Says it’s good for my stamina, visitors. This is what you get when your nurse is also your maid, an arrangement I can’t say I recommend for the faint-hearted.”

Tommy’s tea, it seemed, was fated to go cold.

Several courses of action occurred to Alfie in that moment, none of which seemed appropriate to the peculiar situation at hand. He weighed them one by one and set them aside as he poured himself a second cup. Then he picked up the book that had dropped to the floor when he’d woken to his unexpected and uninvited guest, and let himself find the place where he’d left off reading. He’d been dead long enough to have gained a bit of patience, yeah, forced upon him as it was by the continuing nature of his condition, and the present circumstance seemed to lend itself to finally trying it on for size.

Twenty pages later there was movement across the room. Tommy had pulled a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, and Alfie watched from the corner of his eye as he shook one out. His hands were not steady, and he went through three matches before he got the thing lit. It took all of Alfie’s considerable hard-earned and death-bought toleration of uncertainties to remain silent, to go on reading his book, or to make a go at bluffing.

After a time Nurse Marie returned and swept the remnants of tea away, making a face at Tommy’s full cup and the untouched pile of biscuits. Tommy’s stare was pointed off somewhere near the balcony doors again but it weren’t focused on anything in particular and he’d tended to let the ember of his cigarette burn down to a precarious length of ash before he’d seem to remember it was there and take another drag.

“Will your guest be staying for dinner, Mr. Solomons?” Marie asked.

“Hmm, that is an excellent question, innit.” Alfie lowered his book, studying Tommy for a moment before addressing him directly. “What d’you think, then, mate? Marie’s not a trained chef, not like you’ve got at that manor of yours, but she does a passable roast chicken and potatoes.”

Tommy stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray left on the table by his chair. Alfie didn’t know why he hadn’t had Marie clear the thing away weeks ago, but it was still there, set out during Tommy’s last, announced, visit.

The grandfather clock ticked away the minute it took for Tommy to realize an answer was required of him, or to decide to provide one. When he did, it seemed to come from several kilometers away. “No,” he said.

It weren’t much of a surprise, really; after the refused tea and the trouble he’d had with his matchbox Alfie wasn’t sure he could navigate proper silver. Well, Alfie’d been an invalid for years now, and he knew every trick there was to meet the failings of the flesh.

“Hmm, right, I think a mug of beef tea for myself, Marie, and a hunk of bread. Bring enough for Mr. Shelby here should he have a change of heart upon scenting the aroma of your ambrosia.”

Marie looked just past ready to speak her mind about his visitor’s odd manner but a frown from Alfie held her off. She sent him a curt nod and retreated.

Tommy did not, it turned out, have a change of heart by the time Marie carried in her tray, laden with two large mugs of steaming beef tea and a basket of fresh brown bread. In fact, Tommy looked to be asleep with his eyes open. Alfie’d seen it before, in France, in men who’d been in the trenches long enough, bombarded past the ability to rest naturally. It was best not to disturb them.

Her back to Tommy, Marie pitched her voice low in a polite attempt to hide her question from the guest. “Will Mr. Shelby be staying the night?”

Alfie didn’t have an answer for that question, and should he put it to Tommy directly, he expected he’d get nothing definitive in response. After making a study of the matter for the past hour Alfie had come to the conclusion that despite his physical occupation of the armchair across the room, Tommy wasn’t entirely present, was he; what he was doing in Alfie’s sitting room of all places in this state of distraction was a matter that might be beyond discovery at the moment, without pressing Tommy himself in a way Alfie weren’t yet prepared to attempt, lacking in facts as he was, therefore left to the verbal equivalent of blunt force. Blunt force had never worked on Tommy Shelby on a good day, which this most clearly wasn’t. Blunt force had only ever got him the threat of a hand grenade.

The only remaining alternative involved making a series of calls he was certain to regret, being dead and all.

“Yeah, go ahead and make up the guest room, might as well prepare for all contingencies.”

Night had fallen. Marie lit the lamps and turned the radio on for the evening news broadcast, as was Alfie’s habit, and he didn’t stop her, curious to see if the headlines might have any effect. Tommy, who’d paid them no mind for the past two hours, during which time he’d managed to smoke a second and third cigarette just as poorly as the first, only shifted in his chair. At first it was boring tittle-tattle from London, an update of the state of the stock market’s recovery. Then the announcer got to Parliament and something changed. When he hadn’t been smoking Tommy’s hands had rested loosely in his lap. He hadn’t at all seemed to be listening to the broadcast, but at the mention of the House of Commons, one of his hands fumbled at the leg of his trousers as if smoothing the fabric. He repeated the gesture, a compulsive shove of his palm against his thigh, then again, and again, and again, with a rhythmic rasp of skin on wool.

Alfie straightened, alert with that sense that only came when hellfire was about to rain down on his head. As one of the Labour MPs came on the air -- not Mosley, not anyone Alfie had ever paid any mind to, some reedy sounding bloke from Peckham -- Tommy’s agitation stretched out, a rope strung past its tension point, about to snap. He ceased his nervous worrying at his trousers and sunk his fingers into the cloth like talons.

Marie, who had been winding the clocks, was frowning. “Mr. Solomons, I think--”

“Yeah,” Alfie cut her off. On the radio, the MP from Peckham was going on about the virtues of National Socialism.

Tommy’s lips parted, his chest fluttering. He swallowed, blank gaze bouncing around the room, skidding over Marie by the clock and Alfie on his couch.

“Tommy, look at me,” Alfie ordered. “Tommy.” It struck him then that he had no idea whether the other man was armed. Hadn’t given it thought, prior to this moment, hadn’t felt the need. Fucking amateur of him.

Marie spoke again behind him. “It’s the radio, Mr. Solomons. I’ll turn it--”

“No.” It came sharper than he’d intended, but he needed her to obey and she wasn’t the obedient type, his nurse. A sort of vibration had locked itself into Tommy’s body, one that mightn’t have been notable except for the unnatural fucking stillness he’d maintained most of the afternoon. His eyes were still open, but there was nothing in them. “Just-- you stay where you are, Marie, yeah?” He spared her a quick glance and found her focused but calm, and recalled she’d started her career in Flanders.

Alfie got up, slowly, from his couch, biting back a groan at the stiff ache. Keeping his attention on Tommy, watching for any movement towards a theoretical weapon, he crossed to the polished wood of the radio and turned the knob until the drone of the MP broke off mid-syllable. He waited a moment then, trying and failing to recall if he’d stashed a revolver of his own anywhere in the room. Didn’t think he had. Didn’t think he’d have need for bullets, had he? Not in his retirement. Not after Tommy’s dead-eyed mockery of him during his last visitation.

“Tommy,” he said again, into the silence.

Tommy’s clawed hand gradually uncurled, leaving wrinkled material behind. “Yeah.” Sounded like he’d been garrotted, but it was something.

Alfie ventured a few steps closer to the armchair. “Look at me, right, I need to know you’re not going to startle Marie here, who has the nerves of a peacock, if you can believe it. Hate to see it in a member of the medical profession but she came cheap.” It was all lies of course, Marie had the disposition of a fucking wildcat and cheap she was not, not in any sense of the word.

Tommy’s throat worked. He ducked his head away from Alfie, back towards the balcony doors and the invisible sea. From the whites of his unblinking eyes to the tendon standing out along the side of his neck, he was an animal pushed past the limits of strain.

“Right.” When he took another step Tommy curled in his chair, showing them as much of his back as was possible while remaining seated, the muscles of his face briefly twisting before falling carefully neutral again by apparent force of will. Then he jerked his cap off and held it clenched between white-knuckled hands, exposing his skull.

His entire scalp had been shorn bare.

“Mr. Solomons,” Marie said then, dead calm but insistent, “May I have a word in the hall?”

Alfie didn’t spare her a glance. “No,” he said slowly, “I don’t think so. Thank you, Marie, that’ll be all for tonight.”


	2. Chapter 2

There were things Alfie needed to find out, yeah, obviously, probably a whole fucking ledger full of important facts that might put the evening into some kind of fucking perspective, but he didn’t ask Tommy any more questions. Didn’t invite him to stay, didn’t ask him when he was planning to leave, didn’t offer the guest room with its fire and turned down quilts. He sat on his couch with all the lamps lit and remained on watch while Tommy Shelby sat in his armchair and smoked what cigarettes he had left. His hands returned to his lap when he wasn’t smoking, but he’d gained a tic, thumb rubbing against the first two joints of his middle finger, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. At least he’d quit the fucking rocking.

At some point Alfie’s body hijacked the proceedings and he nodded off and when he woke to the rosy beginnings of dawn and an empty armchair, not one part of him had been surprised. But when he straightened he saw that Tommy’s cap still lay on the seat and through the frosted glass of the balcony doors, a dark shape was just visible against the lightening sky. Tommy Shelby, standing on his balcony. Watching for ships, maybe, or just staring again. Staring seemed to have become his primary occupation.

The shorn head was gonna take a period of adjustment, wasn’t it. It bothered Alfie, the stubbled knob of his skull, it ate at him. So when he finally hauled himself up and opened the balcony doors -- making sure to be noisy and lumbering and slow as a clumsy ox about the whole process, so his presence in his own fucking house weren’t a surprise -- his first words were perhaps ill-advised. They certainly weren’t planned.

“Appropriate, innit.” Dawn painted the side of Tommy’s face, mutely blinking but appearing to follow along. There was even a skeptical sort of curiousity there, in the deep lines around his mouth. “Shimshon,” Alfie continued, “‘Man of the sun.’ Samson to you gentiles. Wiped out an entire army with an ass’s jawbone, if you can believe it, which I do, yeah, because he had God on his side.”

Tommy frowned and turned back towards the morning tide.

“Chosen by God, Samson was. A razor never touched his head, not until he was betrayed, right. Betrayed by his woman.” Maybe he was being deliberately provocative. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it, but nothing he said got him more than a narrow-eyed glare out at the waves. “Hmm. Not a woman, then, eh Tommy?”

He’d done some calculations, Alfie had, before he’d failed in his shift at the watch. Oswald Mosley was still fucking breathing, which meant Tommy’s plan had fallen through, and the only time Tommy Shelby’s pathologically well-constructed plans ever failed him was when some outside force knocked things astray, wasn’t it. Alfie himself had provided that very force more than once. And since Tommy hadn’t been arrested and nothing at all was in the papers, Mosley must not have known of his own botched execution. That left any number of possibilities, but the logical explanation involved some sort of betrayal, didn’t it? Yeah, it always ended there, these things, in some fashion or another. And in his experience, Tommy was funny about betrayal. Either ignored it as if it had never happened or took it absurdly personal, gun shoved into your fucking face personal. Alfie might not yet know the specific circumstances, but this, this looked to be a case of the latter over the former.

“You know the story. I’m sure you do, raised in the Church, right? You papists stole our book for your own, after all.”

Tommy shook his head.

“That’s a lie, mate,” Alfie said. “You know the story. He was captured, Samson, weren’t he? They put out his eyes and put him to work grinding grain, this man who’d fought a lion and won. Imagine that. He could no longer see, no longer had the strength lent him by God, just another prisoner working his hands to the bone, chained to the millstone, no longer chosen by nobody. D’you know what he done then?”

Tommy leaned one hip against the marble of the balcony, shaved head shadowed against the morning light. He seemed to be waiting, warily, for the end of the tale.

“Right. Well, they brought him into a pagan temple, his enemies, in order to gloat over his defeat. But they’d forgot to keep him shorn, and God restored his powers to him with every inch of new growth. So Samson, he shoved at two pillars -- the right two pillars, Samson knew just where to put the pressure, didn’t he -- and the whole thing come down, burying them all in rubble.”

That got him something: the corner of Tommy’s mouth lifted, just a bit.

“Yeah, thought you’d like that part, mate. Your kind of strategy, innit, taking down an entire ancient temple just to smite your foes. By the time Samson won, though, blind and forsaken as he was, he didn’t care that he’d be crushed by the same stones that killed his enemies, did he? No, he didn’t care, because he was already dead.”

Tommy met his gaze evenly and said nothing.

Right. “Cut your own hair then, did you, Thomas?”

He didn’t know whether he’d meant it literally or figuratively, but maybe it was all the same, because Tommy looked him dead in the eye for the first time since he’d arrived and answered in the negative, a flat tone to the word that was meant to shut down all further lines of inquiry.

He hadn’t thought so.

Marie managed to corner him on his way to the lavatory, which was downright rude, wasn’t it, but he had to admire her strategy.

“He’s still here.” It wasn’t a question. “That man, he should be in a hospital. Sir.” They come from the same part of London, he and Marie, and she never addressed him as _sir_ unless it was to make some kind of point. Some fucking days Alfie missed Ollie, who’d at least been the slightest bit afraid of him.

“You coming in to piss with me?” Alfie held the door open for her. “Been awhile since I needed anyone to hold it.”

She was used to him, used to rough men of his sort, and was well able to ignore his impropriety. “I worked on a ward with--”

“I know where you worked, right, I read every fucking page of every letter of reference commending your nursing skill before I hired you.”

“Then you should know I know what I’m saying. Sir. He’s showing signs of stupor with mutism and stereotypies--”

“Enough, Marie, fucking enough.”

“--and most likely was in an asylum. Recently. I know the look.”

Alfie stared at her, gone briefly mute himself. “An asylum,” he repeated, as if he hadn’t understood her meaning. “Fucking hell, you’ve got it twisted. That’s ridiculous.”

“He should be in treatment. Under supervision of doctors. I’m not qualified to deal on me own with this.”

“Haven’t asked you to treat anyone but your original patient, now, have I?” Alfie sighed. “You have my permission to take a leave of absence if you’re uncomfortable with the presence of my unscheduled visitor. We both know I’ve fucking recovered enough from my afflictions to muddle along on my own without a bloody nursemaid.” With that, he shut the door on her.

When he emerged, she was in the kitchen, preparing his breakfast with an unholy clatter of pans, and Tommy Shelby was still on the balcony, staring at the nothing on the horizon.

Though Alfie couldn’t be certain, he hadn’t yet known Marie to be wrong about much in her field. It was why he’d hired her, after all. She’d wanted a change from Queen Square and he’d wanted someone competent and willing to overlook the fact that he was, in fact, legally and mythologically speaking, deceased.

A newly informed eye could take in more than the ignorant one, yeah, and so after he broke his fast Alfie took a more critical gaze back to his sitting room with him. The curve of the shorn skull before him was littered with small white lines and pits, old shrapnel marks probably, but shocking in its comparative breadth was the jagged indentation along the right side which marked the place where the bone had been cracked open like an egg by order of Section D’s pet priest. It was one thing to have heard second or third hand about a man’s fucking near-fatal wound, even to see lingering traces of long illness in his visage months later; it was another to be confronted by the scars bared this fucking directly, even years healed, to the naked eye. And it was something else entirely to suspect the circumstances under which this ancient evidence of injury had been revealed at all, counter to everything he knew about the man’s personal vanity.

Fuck. He found he couldn’t argue with Marie’s deductions, not even in his own fucking head. He’d seen these things before. In France, yeah, and back home again as well. Retreating to his cramped and disused study, closed door between him and the rest of the house, Alfie made a forbidden call to the world of the living, outside Margate.

“Yeah, Ollie? You know who this fucking is, you don’t need to say my name, mate, we’ve talked about this on numerous occasions, haven’t we, the fact that I no longer require direct address of any sort. I need you to make some inquiries for me, and I need this to be discreet, do you follow me? I don’t want to find out you’ve been gossiping like an old woman. I may be dead but I can still fucking harrow your arse all the way to hell, can’t I.”

And so he gave Ollie his quest. In the meantime, though, he still had the silent man on his balcony to contend with, for however long he intended to remain. Hospitality was sacred, right, and boredom made an eager host, but he needed to know what exactly had fallen into his hands before he blundered into any grenades left planted in hidden crannies, easily and stupidly set off even if you was watching for them.

Nobody had ever accused Alfie Solomons of being slow on the uptake, even retired from the adventurous life as he was, but coming to any sort of quick conclusion about anything was complicated when the subject of your analysis refused most forms of communication. So it took Alfie well into the afternoon to notice Tommy’d run out of cigarettes some time during the night and was feeling the lack.

Despite the chill, he’d spent most of the morning on the balcony, Tommy had. He’d tolerated Alfie’s presence well enough, but he was back to bouncing off any direct gaze like the wrong end of a magnet and he hadn’t uttered a sound since that last definitive No. With nothing else in the way of options, Alfie had alternated between keeping him company -- he left off from weeding the local population of gulls, given he still hadn’t determined whether Tommy himself was armed and what his reaction to the sound of pistol-fire might be at the moment -- and recuperating on his couch from the unfamiliar exertion. Keeping up a rambling monologue at the phantom who’d taken up residence on his balcony proved to be more tiring than he’d have expected, as it was the most excitement he’d had since he’d woken up on the sand, a furrow dug through his fucking face from that phantom’s very real bullet.

“Couldn’t help but relish it a bit at first, mate, the lack of interruption from you in particular of all men.” A breeze had picked up, an insistent reminder of winter, but Tommy’d paid it no mind. After that brief moment of connection when Alfie’d asked him about his shorn skull, he’d pulled back into himself like the tide, and now his eyes were shuttered once more, face tilted away from Alfie to take in the weak February sun. “Hmm, yeah. The novelty’s worn thin. No fucking challenge to it, is there?”

Alfie couldn’t be certain Tommy was even listening. Fuck, he couldn’t be certain Tommy was currently _hearing_ him, could he?

“Marie insists you was locked up before you materialized in my fucking sitting room like some kind of demon.” Alfie couldn’t bring himself to say it yet, _asylum_, mouth unable to form the syllables, stumbling like a coward up against the concreteness of the word when he made the attempt. “Wouldn’t be the first of us, would you. Surplus stock from France, banged up a bit, left unsaleable and on our own to make a go of it.”

Tommy’s only response was to start rifling through his trouser pockets. He was of course wearing the same suit he’d arrived in, Tommy, but it was only then that Alfie noticed the lack of any of his usual fussy accessories: no neatly pressed square of silk in his jacket pocket, no gold watch with its fancy fob and chain, no tie so no tie pin, no collar or collar bar to hold it. After a moment he pulled one hand out of his pocket, empty, then the other appeared with what looked like it might be a ticket stub.

“You take the train here, mate?” Even if there was little hope of an answer, asking was automatic, wasn’t it, given his need for information. Without his spectacles, the marks on the paper might as well have been fucking hieroglyphics. The stub slipped from Tommy’s fingers as if he’d already forgotten it and the wind whisked it over the balcony and off to the sea before Alfie could snatch it for his own examination.

Fuck.

“Right,” he muttered to himself as Tommy disappeared back into the sitting room.

It took him a moment to follow, given his own infirmity, and when he got there Tommy was already deep into a search of the room. It was the most animation he’d shown, and Alfie watched, puzzled, as he carefully picked through the flotsam and jetsam that filled the corners and tables and cabinets. At first he went about it in a characteristically methodical manner, in no sort of hurry. He poked through the stack of books on the table by Alfie’s couch, investigated the gramophone, picked up the stuffed iguana and set it down again as if whatever he was looking for might have been nicked by a dead lizard. When he hadn’t turned anything up after his first circuit, he started again, reversing his path. Bumped into the piano, knocking a candlestick down to clatter onto the ivories with a sharp cacophony of notes. Shoved the wheelchair aside, ran his hands along the radio. Crossed the small room back and forth with quickening steps until he was tossing things to the floor. A book, the battered white skull of a fox, Alfie’s binoculars.

“Them binoculars are a delicate instrument, mate, what--”

Tommy swept a lamp from one of the tables with one hand. Kicked at the resulting shards of glass, gaze darting around the room without seeming to see it any longer.

“Tommy,” Alfie barked. “Fucking hell, mate, that was a very lovely lamp. Antique, even.” It weren’t, but that was far from the point.

Tommy’s hands fisted, the tendons standing out in his wrists as he stared down at the glass scattered round his feet. A muscle jumped along his jaw and his face screwed up as if, for the first time, he was making the effort to speak something more complex than his two previous chosen words could convey.

Alfie waited, but nothing came. “Yeah, okay,” he said, finding his calm. “You’re looking for something, I got that much. What is it you think might be hid inside my fucking lamp?”

Tommy’s mouth pressed into a brittle line and he scanned the room again, more focused this time. Then he stumbled towards Alfie’s couch and snatched something up, holding it clenched in one fist, a tremor running through him now, traveling up his arm as he held whatever it was out towards Alfie.

It was a pipe.

All this fuss was about his smokes? Fucking _cigarettes_? “Marie threw the pack away when she was tidying up this morning. It was empty, mate, you ran out.”

At that Tommy turned and hurled the pipe into the mirror set into the cabinet behind him. It hit with a terrific splintering crash and tumbled somewhere out of sight in the dusty shadows of the room.

Marie came running, naturally, a fucking cleaver gripped in her hand. Alfie kept his eye on Tommy, who looked to have been overcome with something close to shock, as if he’d just watched some other man ruin a fucking mirror in a fit of pique. That one _had_ been antique, not that Alfie had particularly cared for it, but it was the principle, wasn’t it. Hospitality was one thing but houseguests, even uninvited and possibly fugitive ones, weren’t welcome to raze the fucking place willy-nilly.

Breathing hard, Tommy was on high alert, near shivering with it, waiting for… something. Waiting for fucking what?

“Alright, yeah,” Alfie said, gathering back his composure. “Right. Marie, Mr. Shelby here requires a generous supply of cigarettes, and at least an equal number of matches.”

Marie lowered the cleaver and shot Alfie a withering, know-it-all sort of look before retreating back into the hall, knuckles still white around the handle of her knife, hopefully to requisition the requested smokes before Tommy decided to tear the rest of the place apart. The momentary frenzy had passed, however. Tommy just stood there staring at the carpet now, his hands shaking.

“I’ll have you know that was my favorite pipe, Thomas,” Alfie said, finally. When he was certain there wouldn’t be any more excitement for the moment, he went to make sure Marie’d taken his orders seriously and weren’t ringing the fucking police. She categorically refused his request that she clean up the broken glass, however, used a few choice words to do so in fact, so he retrieved a broom and dustpan from the closet himself.

By the time he got back, Tommy was in his armchair again, watching the clouds out the balcony doors as if nothing had happened.

So he’d learnt something from the ruckus at least: it weren’t that Tommy refused to speak beyond yea or nay out of some stubborn embargo on words; he seemed to have lost the knack altogether. Should he ever find himself struck dumb, Alfie supposed he’d fucking break a mirror or two, or worse. Mutism, Marie had said. The other thing she’d said -- stupor -- well, that seemed to come and go, and now the storm had passed it was back, worse than before.

At first it was something of a relief. Though he’d never have admitted it, all the commotion had taken its toll on Alfie, leaving him drained and heavy, his back one long swath of clenched-up agony. He abandoned Tommy to his staring and let Marie give him his massage and if she dug in with a bit more force than was strictly necessary therapeutically speaking, he didn’t mention it.

“He could be dangerous,” Marie said, her nimble thumbs pressing into a spot just below one of his shoulder blades.

“Course he’s fucking dangerous, he’s head of a fucking razor gang, Marie,” Alfie huffed out between digs into his resistant flesh.

“You said he was an MP.”

“Them Members of Parliament are far more likely to cause you damage than any hard-case smuggler of whiskey ever would.” He rolled over to his back on her order with a grunt. “Besides, you realize, right, that you yourself are employed by a notorious gangster of the worst sort.”

“Hmm,” Marie said to that. Alfie wasn’t sure she’d ever believed him about his former occupation, despite the fact she had family in Camden Town, where everybody knew his fucking name, despite the terms of her original employment being related to the obvious fucking hole shot through his face. “Could be a danger to himself, then.”

“Wouldn’t be nothing new, would it, if the man’s anything he’s a danger to his fucking self.” Then he couldn’t speak for a moment, as Marie deftly manipulated some infernal pressure point until the rusty pulley-and-rope contraption that was his shoulder eased a notch. “All he did was break some shit nobody gives a damn about, Marie. He’s meek as a songbird now, right.”

“Without knowing his diagnosis, or what treatment he was given, there might--”

“What, Marie. Fucking out with it, because doling it in dribs and drabs while you torture me is trying my fucking patience, mate.”

Marie took her hands away from him. “Complications. There might be complications.”

“I always appreciate the counsel of your medical wisdom, I do,” he said, tilting his chin up to try to get a look at her face where she was perched behind him. “I take it to heart, yeah. I’m playing this by ear, right, and I’ve released you from your duties until things with Mr. Shelby resolve themselves. Who the hell knows if he’ll even be out there by the time we’re finished.”

He was, of course. Didn’t look to have moved an inch the entire hour Alfie’d been on Marie’s table. Impossible to tell whether he’d even fucking noticed Alfie’s absence.


	3. Chapter 3

One question had pestered Alfie since the previous evening, yeah, through the afternoon while Marie pounded his flesh, while he read one of the novels she’d brought him, while he ate the lunch Tommy’d denied any interest in sharing. The suspicious voice in his head persisted in going in circles, insisting it would be best if he found out sooner rather than too late to be helped. He held out as long as he could in the face of Tommy’s lapse into an even deeper aloof passivity than before, but it built up in him like some kind of corrosive gas in a pipe, the question, and finally he gave into the impulse.

He sat forward on his couch, facing the armchair directly. “You got a gun on you, Tommy?”

While the man had surely made an art form of expressionlessness, Alfie’d known him long enough to have developed a talent for discerning shades to that masklike face. But since his tantrum over the cigarettes, Tommy’d been as close to unreadably vacant as Alfie’d ever seen him. It was uncanny, really, as if he’d retreated so far inside himself he’d erased all traces of his current existence as a conscious being.

“Mate, I’ve let it go ‘till now, but seeing how you apparently intend to remain a guest here for the indeterminate future, and given the fact that even in my currently retired state I am a distrustful old cut-throat myself, set my fucking mind at ease, yeah?”

Nothing.

The lack of a denial could be an admittance, right, or a signal that he was unarmed and bluffing, or it could be that he just weren’t in the room enough to notice he’d been asked. Impossible to tell. As the hours had worn on the clouds had filled the view from the balcony doors until it became one stretch of drab grey, but Tommy was still in that tattered armchair, skygazing. Finally, Alfie stood and crossed the room to block the path of his stare. Got no fucking reaction for his trouble, so maybe it hadn’t been the clouds Tommy’d been watching at all. Maybe he saw nothing beyond whatever was happening inside his own head.

“Fucking hell, let’s move to higher ground for a moment and establish whether or not you’re even fucking listening.” Something seemed to change, but what it was, Alfie couldn’t name. “Tommy. You hearing me at all?”

Long after Alfie’d given up on the notion of a response, just as he was about to turn away: “No.” It was almost mulish, that _no_, but that could just be Alfie reading a tone into the single syllable to give it some shape, couldn’t it, because as far as he could tell, Tommy still weren’t the least bit focused on his presence.

Right. Well that cleared everything up. Shy of physically searching him -- something he was reluctant to attempt for obvious fucking reasons -- he’d just have to live with the uncertainty.

The day before Tommy’d made his appearance Alfie had complained of boredom to Marie. Not outright, not in so many words, but yeah, he’d been fucking bored, and he could admit it freely in the space of his own head. He’d been cooped up in these rooms so long it had started to feel like maybe he really was dead, and he’d wanted a change, something to keep him entertained, something to set his mind to unpuzzling, and it looked like he’d gotten his wish. Whatever else it was, it certainly weren’t boring, sharing space with a possibly armed racketeering MP who panicked at voices on the radio but spent the rest of his time ignoring the people in front of him in favor of ogling nothing much at all.

Alfie Solomons knew he might be many things, but easily ignorable weren’t fucking one of them.

Since he’d asked about the gun there’d been something of a slow shift in the quality of the silence. Tommy’d taken to a sluggish and erratic blinking of the eyes, like a sentry struggling to remain alert at his post. His shoulders had lost some of their stiffness and he’d seemed to gradually sink into the stuffed chair. Alfie’d thought maybe he’d nod off and had ceased his own idle attempts at chatter, hoping to facilitate the process, but whether through inability or sheer force of will, Tommy remained, to all outward appearances, awake.

The weekly delivery of supplies had arrived late in the afternoon, with them a crate of cigarettes and enough matches to light up a battalion. Alfie liberated a pack and a matchbox from the crate and carried them into the sitting room, triumphant.

“Dunno if they’re your brand, Thomas, but I assume these will be sufficient to your needs? They’re tobacco, anyhow, in smokable form.”

It took a long time, too long, but at last Tommy’s attention seemed to distill into something concentrated enough to shift towards the packet of cigarettes Alfie held out like an offering. It reminded him of watching a man wade through mud up to his chest from one end of a trench to another. Tommy focused on Alfie’s hands and a faint frown surfaced and despite his earlier outburst at the lack, he failed utterly to reach for them.

“Yeah, that’s alright, innit,” Alfie said. He set the cigarettes and matchbook on the arm of Tommy’s chair and stepped away.

The little beginnings of a frown deepened. He was at least looking at the pack of cigarettes now, even if he hadn’t made a move towards them.

“Like coaxing a feral pup,” Alfie muttered, mostly to himself. “If I make myself fucking scarce, will you take what you obviously want?” If it actually fucking worked, maybe he should try it with food next. “Speaking of dogs, right, your people better be looking after Cyril during your absence.”

And with that, he turned his back on Tommy Shelby and his cigarettes and left the room.

He met Marie in the hall, in her coat and hat, on her way out for her regular Saturday evening sabbatical. Back when he’d still required continuous assistance, she’d had a night nurse come in her absence, but that time had long since passed. Whatever she got up to on her personal time Alfie’d never asked, and she’d never volunteered. Everyone needed their private side of life, right, and he’d always left her to hers, especially as he himself no longer had much of one.

“I’m going to dinner and then the pictures,” Marie announced. “At the Hippodrome.”

Alfie paused, brows raised, struck wordless himself for once.

“I left the number for the ticket office on your desk,” she continued.

“I… see.” Alfie wasn’t sure what his face was doing, but Marie’s jaw was set at a stubborn angle.

“For emergencies. Mr. Solomons--”

He raised a hand to stop her. “Yeah, right, I fucking got it, enjoy your evening. I am, at this juncture, perfectly capable of surviving upwards of several hours at a time on my own.”

Marie gave him a doubtful sort of nod and departed, and he took the opportunity to shut himself in his office. Chances were Ollie himself was out, it being Saturday night and Ollie being a youngish sort of bloke still. Chances were it was too soon for him to have found anything of use. Alfie gave the switchboard girl Ollie’s number anyhow and leaned back in his chair, waiting for the call to go through.

“You got something for me?” Alfie asked, the moment Ollie came on the line.

“Uh… oh, well, hey, boss, I wasn’t expecting--”

“Ollie, do you or do you not have any information for me?”

Ollie cleared his throat and came back a little more solid. “Yeah, yes, I do.” Alfie rubbed at his forehead. At this rate Tommy’d be able to smoke the whole fucking pack without interruption. “Alright, yeah, took me all bloody afternoon but I got something. You wanted to know about patients who’d been admitted to hospitals or asylums in London or Birmingham after December 6th, which, uh, turned out to be a long list.”

“Ollie.”

“Yeah, yeah. So Tommy Shelby wasn’t on that list, right? But there was one bloke might be a match. Committed to Bedlam under the name John Michael Jones, but I’m pretty sure it’s an alias, because the only similar John Jones I could find record of died in 1928.”

“Ollie--”

“Yeah, getting there. So John M. Jones, born 1890, enlisted 1915 with the Warwickshire Yeomanry, wounded in France, discharged in 1919. Admitted by his psychiatrist, a Dr. Brooke, on December 13th of last year. Diagnosis is listed as uh, dementia praecox. I got the file off ‘em and there’s a bunch more, technical stuff. But something’s fishy, which is why I thought it might interest you.”

Admitted by his psychiatrist, a week after Mosley’s speech_._ Hmm. “Don’t keep me in suspense, mate.”

“So, yeah. Mr. Jones apparently died. Again. Guess when an inmate is, uh, agitated, they’re strapped down and loaded up with a drug that puts ‘em to sleep for a couple of days, and sometimes they don’t wake up. My contact says it happens, right, but this one got messy, ‘cause when his doctor came to collect the body for the family, it wasn’t there.”

Alfie sat with that a moment. “So when did this Mr. Jones meet his fate, then?”

“February 5th.” Two days before Tommy’d washed up on his beach, so to speak. “Listen to this, boss. One of the orderlies went missing, or walked off the job, round the same time. Nobody’s heard from ‘em.”

“Right. Well. We still got that contact in Warwickshire?”

There was a short, flustered silence. “Warwickshire? You mean at Shelby’s house?”

“Unless you’ve taken up some other opportunity for profit in Warwickshire, yeah, Ollie, thought you had struck up a mutually beneficial exchange of coin for intelligence with--”

“It was one of the maids, Al--”

“Ollie.” For _fuck’s_ _sake_, he was fucking _dead_, and dead men didn’t have names, did they? Not when anyone might be listening in, anyhow.

“Yeah. Boss. It was one of the maids, but it’s been years, I dunno if she’s even still there.”

“So renew your acquaintance if she is, and if she’s not--”

“Right, I got it.”

“Look into the psychiatrist, yeah? And find that orderly, if he’s still alive.”

Maybe Ollie’d been lacking in excitement as well, because he agreed to all the extra labour easily enough. Of course, he also knew Alfie paid generously for his little favors. He wasn’t certain what he meant to do with whatever additional intelligence Ollie dug up; hell, he wasn’t certain what he meant to do with what he’d learnt in the previous five minutes. But groping in the dark was his least favorite way of traveling, innit, so he disconnected the call, scratching his beard pensively as he filed away the information on Mr. Jones.

If Ollie were right about the alias, Tommy’d been in Bedlam since shortly after Mosley’s fucking speech, and his family likely thought him dead. Though not all his relations was as thick as his older brother, right, the aunt might have figured it out, or that nephew of his that’d killed Daniel. Truth was, if they tracked down that orderly before Ollie did, they might discover whatever breadcrumb trail Tommy’d left between Mr. Jones’s untimely demise and Alfie’s Margate afterlife. And Alfie weren’t ready to be forcibly resurrected by a random representative of Shelby Company, Ltd.

Surprise fucking surprise, Tommy was still in his armchair by the time Alfie made it back to the sitting room, possibilities and probabilities rolling around in his skull, bouncing off each other with a click-clack like marbles.

“Gonna get sores on your arse, you don’t change fucking position once in awhile, mate,” Alfie advised, settling into the room’s second, unoccupied armchair, for a new perspective. “I know this from experience and pleasant it ain’t.”

Last he’d left things, Tommy’d looked to be teetering on the edge of sleep; now there was a stiffness to him hadn’t been there before. He’d quit his surveillance of the balcony doors, gaze fixed somewhere across the room near the gramophone, where the pale sunbeams of late afternoon couldn’t reach and things had gotten dim and shadowy with encroaching nightfall. It had gone sharp, too, that gaze, like he was tracking something that might at any moment lunge for his throat. His mouth hung open slightly and as Alfie watched a forceful exhalation of air escaped, as from a man struck just under the ribs with a truncheon.

Alfie hesitated, sweeping his attention around the room, trying to discover a cause for the frozen rictus of horror. Tommy’s reaction last night to the radio had been easily enough deciphered: something had happened with Mosley, and the MP from Peckham had been going on about National Socialism, hadn’t he. But nothing at all was happening right now. Nothing. It was dead still.

“Tommy.” Fucking hell. He was shaking again, just slightly, more of a quiver really, a rabbit cornered by a fox and blocked from escape. “_Tommy._”

Nothing. _Fuck_. Tommy’s eyes widened and followed, slowly, while whatever he was seeing moved away from the gramophone and seemed to approach him. He started sucking in short, noisy pants, gone the color of newsprint.

Should he fucking do something? Felt like he should, right, but Tommy didn’t hear him at all as far as he could tell, and touching a man in this sort of state never ended well for anybody.

Tommy’s hands came up and covered his face like a child afraid of the bogeyman, and then dropped. Whatever he saw must still have been there, because he clutched at the arm of his chair and squeezed his eyes shut with a shudder.

The hair on the back of Alfie’s neck stood on end. “Thomas,” he ventured after a long moment. Tommy flinched at the sound of his voice -- meant it’d registered, at least, didn’t it -- and opened his eyes. He blinked rapidly, took a shaky inhale, and released his grip on the chair. His other hand was doing that thing he’d done while the MP talked, rubbing at his thigh over and over. “Alright, alright, it’s passed, yeah?”

He turned his head, finally, toward Alfie, dazed and waxen in the remaining light, and swallowed. Alfie switched on the lamp next to his own chair, then stood and slowly lit every lamp in the rest of the room, driving back the shadows.

“It’s gone, mate. Whatever you saw, it’s gone now, right?” The shorn head shook, jerkily, from side to side, his attention never leaving Alfie, locked somewhere around his chest as if afraid to glance away. “Still there, then?”

He could adapt, Alfie: if he left enough empty space, sometimes the silence would drag an answer from Tommy. So he let the ticking of the clocks fill the room and the ancient grandfather behind him struck four-thirty before anything happened. Eyes brimming with dread, Tommy turned back towards the corner.

The breath rushed out of him. “No,” he said, threadbare.

“Hmm.” Alfie found a seat on his couch again where he’d be in Tommy’s direct line of sight. “One of my men, worth his weight in gold he was, this lad could sense when the rum was ready by smell alone. Orphan, you know, lied and told the War Office he was twenty when best as he can figure it he was just shy of fifteen. Must’ve looked eleven, tops, and the bastards fucking took him anyway, but his sergeant watched out for him. Sometimes he’d see that sergeant split from stem to stern before his eyes, right there in the bakery, guts tumbling out to the dusty floor at his feet.”

Tommy took that in, or didn’t; it was hard to tell.

“So was it the battlefield then, just now in my sitting room?”

He was still rubbing at his thigh, like there was an ache deep in the bone. Shook his head.

Inspiration struck, though when it came it was so obvious Alfie felt the fool. He rifled through the pile next to his couch and came up with the cheap notebook he used to make lists for Marie and Ollie to execute for him, and a fountain pen. Held them out towards Tommy, who just watched him warily.

“Got that words aren’t coming to you, at least not ones that want to be spoken,” Alfie said. “But the question is, Tommy, are you able to write?”

“No,” Tommy said, immediately this time, just on the edge of belligerent; but when Alfie got up and dropped the notebook and pen onto the table at his elbow his attention locked onto them with an unsettled sort of doubt in the line of his jaw.

At some point while Alfie’d been on the phone he must have opened the pack of cigarettes left to him, because the ashen corpse of one sat forgotten and barely-smoked in the ashtray. The pack reappeared now, conjured from Tommy’s jacket pocket, and he lit up, still a bit wobbly. After Alfie’d settled back into his own chair and made a sham attempt at reading one of his books, Tommy lurched upright and paced to the balcony doors, cigarette dangling from his lips. Yanked the curtains aside to peer out at what was left of the twilight, a trailing phantom of smoke drifting lazily in his wake.

When he’d finish a cigarette, he’d make a circuit back to the ashtray to stub it out, light another, then return to his place at the balcony doors. He didn’t open them, though they were unlocked, and as night fell he couldn’t have seen much through the glass, between the reflection of the lamps and the darkness beyond. As the clock struck six Alfie decided he was hungry and left Tommy to his smoking to venture into the kitchen, where Marie had left him cold sliced roast beef in the icebox. Seemed rude to keep eating in front of a man who insisted on abstention, so Alfie had his supper standing up at the kitchen counter.

By the time he returned to the sitting room Tommy’s ashtray was half full and he was still loitering by the balcony doors, but he’d stripped off his jacket and unbuttoned his waistcoat and the notebook Alfie had given him sat open on the couch cushions. Alfie picked it up and settled back onto the couch, stretching his legs out and fumbling on the table for his spectacles, then lifted the notebook, tilting it away from his view until the letters became clear through the lenses perched on his nose. There were a series of badly formed words at the top of the page, scribbled out into unreadable black blobs with ink. Then a single unmolested word in the center, handwriting clumsy but legible, underlined for emphasis, the pen marks dug into the paper.

> MULI

Well. That… didn’t clear anything much up. Might have been a random string of letters for all Alfie could tell, but it was something, wasn’t it. It was communication of a sort, beyond the flip of a coin.

When he glanced up from the notebook Tommy was regarding him with a flushed intensity, as if he hadn’t expected Alfie to understand but had still harbored some reluctant hope about the matter.

Maybe not so random. “This is Romani, yeah?” Alfie realized, slowly. “Sorry, mate, I don’t--”

Tommy crossed the room in two long strides and snatched the notebook from him before Alfie could react. Tore the page out and crumpled it in one fist and paced the length of the room twice, then grabbed the pen and scribbled something new, pacing the whole while, a distressed shade of annoyance plain on his face. When he was satisfied -- or had given up -- he thrust the notebook back towards Alfie, who took it from him.

> DEAD
> 
> **DEAD** <strike>DEAD</strike>

“Yeah, okay, dead, got it,” Alfie said. “What you saw earlier was a dead thing?”

A frowning rush of air. Tommy nodded, then shook his head, then threw the pen to the floor and lit another cigarette.

“Dead but not dead,” Alfie mused. “Alright, mate.”

He’d got the general idea -- not the battlefield, but a vision of someone who had died. It narrowed things down, right, they’d made some progress. Problem was men like them, with the lives they’d led, had seen any number of people perish outside the war, had not in-fucking-frequently facilitated that process themselves. Alfie supposed he could start calling out names from what he knew of Tommy’s history but that might take all night and he suspected if Tommy’d been able to be more precise, he would have written it out in the first place, wouldn’t he.

After all that struggle he wasn’t sure it mattered much, whatever it was Tommy’d seen. Alfie knowing it was somebody dead wouldn’t make a fucking bit of difference if it happened again. It’d never made a difference that everyone in the distillery knew Lenny saw his sergeant when he was screaming his fucking head off between the barrels of rum, not to Lenny anyhow, not in the horrific moment of seeing. Only difference it made was they all knew what to expect when it came, and didn’t jump to the conclusion the boy was being bloody murdered no matter how it sounded. By the time Alfie had sold the distillery and retired, it had become downright mundane, the occasional bout of screaming.

Still, difference or not, the whole production had gained Alfie two new pieces of potentially useful information: that a written correspondence might be a marginally clearer, if belabored, means of getting information from Tommy, and that there was no sign at all he’d been wearing a holster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Romani dialog from the "Romani Dictionary: Kalderash - English" by Ronald Lee. I realize this is most likely a different dialect than would be spoken by the characters on the show. I haven't given a translation here because Alfie wouldn't know what Tommy's saying and the context is clear enough, I think.


	4. Chapter 4

Alfie took his newly won knowledge with him into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Looked up at a small sound to find that Tommy’d shadowed him and was peering with blunted curiousity around the cheery little room, at the hanging cluster of copper pots and pans and the painted plates in the sideboard. He watched hawk-like as Alfie measured out loose black tea into a teapot and prepared a tray. Alfie didn’t ask, just gathered two cups and saucers from the cabinet.

“You take sugar, mate? Milk?”

Tommy shook his head. The kettle whistled and he scrutinized every movement as Alfie filled the teapot with hot water. He’d lost the waistcoat and pushed up his sleeves, revealing wrists and forearms painted with deep purpled marks, shading at the edges to brownish-yellow.

“Bedlam, was it?” Alfie asked as he returned the kettle to the stove, nodding at the exposed bruises.

A startled flash of rage ran through him. Shoving the sleeves back down his arms, he stalked out of the kitchen and disappeared down the hall.

Fucking hell, but he was tired. Alfie lifted the tray with the full teapot and empty teacups and beat a weary path back to the sitting room. Half expecting Tommy to have vanished, right, because it weren’t as if the question of what the fuck he was even doing here was a new one. It’d set up shop in the back corner of Alfie’s brain, that question, reminding him again and again that as much as he pretended otherwise, no matter how much intelligence he gathered on the situation, he was out of his fucking depth, wasn’t he.

By the time he made it back to the sitting room Tommy was pacing the short stretch of carpet in front of the balcony doors, scribbling in the notebook again. Alfie set his tray of tea down on a table and poured out a cup for himself, settling back on his couch with a grunt as his bones shifted the wrong direction at first and he had to adjust. Tommy paused in his furious scribbling and eagle-eyed the tea set.

“Help yourself,” Alfie said, taking a sip.

Avoiding Alfie’s gaze, spots of color high on his cheeks from whatever emotion was driving him, Tommy tore the page he’d been writing on out of the notebook and held it out until Alfie took it.

> JANUARY
> 
> **New Year** it starts born in jan. born on the january only the Janury 4 days on the January floating passed
> 
> 4 days on the river. Full of heavy cargo & fucking coal & spooked horses &

As Alfie read, Tommy ran a finger around the inside of his empty teacup, then lifted the pot, the spout rattling against the edge of the cup as he filled it. Alfie couldn’t make much sense of the jumble of words, but the central theme was clear enough to take a stab. If Ollie was right -- and from Tommy’s reaction the information was dead on -- he’d been locked up out at St. George’s Fields since mid-December.

Alfie looked up from the black scrawl, frowning. “January’s passed us by, mate. It’s the eighth of February, innit, least for a few more hours.”

He didn’t seem to be breathing. For a moment Alfie was sure he was going to hurl his delicate gold-rimmed, painted-flower teacup to smash against the wall the way he had the pipe. Instead, carefully, carefully, Tommy set the cup back on its saucer and walked out of the room.

It weren’t a big place, this, and he didn’t get far. Seemed to have found the lavatory by sheer instinct, though it was the obvious choice in a hall with only one doorway between sitting room and kitchen. He hadn’t latched the door in his haste and so it didn’t much muffle the choking retch that petered off into a painful gagging. Fuck, he’d consumed neither solid nor liquid in the day since he’d turned up, there couldn’t be much to lose. Overly familiar with the sensation -- though thankfully not for the last year or so -- Aflie left him to it.

By the time Tommy reemerged the kettle was whistling again. Alfie had collected the tea tray and pulled down a second pot and was just spooning out a measure of dried yellow flowers when he appeared in the kitchen doorway, blotchy white and red in the face, eyes laced with broken vessels.

“Romashka,” Alfie said, though he didn’t quite look focused enough yet to have been wondering. It was something to fill the silence. Tommy swiped a hand over his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose, his jaw clenched. “That’s what me mum called it, anyway. Chamomile. Easier on the stomach than the ole Earl Grey.”

The hand dropped away and he gave Alfie a short nod. Then, without asking -- after all, asking directly weren’t in his wheelhouse at the moment -- he pushed into the kitchen proper and started rummaging around the cabinets, opening doors one by one. Alfie just stood back and let him hunt for whatever he was looking for. Eventually he located the glasses and filled one up at the sink, then took a ginger sip.

“Probably a foolish thing to mention at this particular juncture, mate, but the ice box is there, should you find yourself needing something more substantial than water at any point in the future. Marie leaves me enough provisions to survive for three days on her evenings off, despite the fact she’s usually back before midnight.”

Tommy shook his head with a nauseated grimace and sipped at his water.

“Yeah, right,” Alfie said. “You want some of this herbal concoction, then?” One shoulder lifted, which wasn’t a no. Probably waiting to see if the water would stay put.

Alfie thought about taking a seat at the little kitchen table, just for a change of pace -- it was a cozy room, the kitchen -- but the chairs were wooden and unpadded and he knew he’d last five minutes before his sciatica flared.

“You’d expect that being dead, I’d no longer have to worry myself over the state of my back, mate, but alas, I seem to have crossed only one of the five rivers of the underworld, leaving me my sorrow and lamentation intact.”

Tommy glanced at him sidelong, then set his water glass on the silver tea tray and went about finding clean teacups and saucers to join the pot of brewing chamomile. When he lifted the tray, everything rattled. What the hell, it was only dishes; if the worst happened due to that uncertain grip, Alfie could always buy more, couldn’t he. Not like teacups was a rarity in Margate. Alfie followed him back to the sitting room, rambling on and ignoring the occasional violent clink of porcelain.

“_And those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things_. Lethe, innit. You’ve crossed that threshold more than once, Thomas, since you’ve come to visit me here in the outer rings of Hades, known to the rest of the world as, you know, Margate. This room, I’ve come to conclude, is my own private version of Purgatory. More your religion’s shit than mine, Purgatory, but as a concept it is a creative one, and I believe a man should make full use of whatever metaphors he can get his hands on to understand his own singular situation.”

He was weary of the couch, so he robbed Tommy of his spot in the armchair. Truth was, he was bone tired of the entire fucking room. He’d catalogued each inch of every corner and all the various details of every bit of flotsam until it had lost all meaning. Sometimes, in his bedridden malaise, he’d imagined it all burning around him, just for the change in atmosphere.

One of Tommy’s brows had climbed, his expression caught between alarmed and fond, so it was likely he’d said some of that aloud, wasn’t it. He’d found space for the tray of tea and poured out a cup, which he gave to Alfie, then retrieved his notebook and pen. This time he handed Alfie a slip torn from a full page, as if he’d decided to start conserving paper.

> they long oblivion taste

“Hmm, yeah. _Of future life secure, forgetful of the past_. You been reading Virgil, have you?” But he’d moved on, back to his post at the balcony doors. “In your last missive, you was talking about cargo. Did you fail to meet some business deadline, or--”

Tommy turned, his eyes two inimical holes. “Yeah,” he bit off. The next scroll was less neatly penned.

> **BLACK CAT**
> 
> <strike>9 lives</strike> the
> 
> 9TH CIRCLE

“Dante too then, eh? No mistaking that one,” Alfie mused. “Ninth circle of hell’s for traitors, innit.”

That got him a grim nod. Tommy poured himself a cup of chamomile and frowned a bit at the flowery taste.

“Should have got down the honey for the uninitiated, but I usually take it plain. So the cargo, then?” Alfie couldn’t help but ask. You could take the gangster out of the business, and all that. “Getting the company back into smuggling after the crash, hm?”

He set down his teacup and wrote a bit in his notebook, hunched over, crossing things out. Started pacing again as he did, a tightly fuming marking off of steps like a wolf stuck in a too-small cage at the London Zoo. Alfie didn’t much care for zoos. Too many conquered predators staring out at him from behind the bars.

> stole the fucking crown
> 
> cargo packed under the coal on the January
> 
> on the bridge it went under the bridge
> 
> <strike>She was</strike> under the coal
> 
> <strike>Looking up</strike> <strike>i was there</strike>

Every time he thought maybe he had a handle on what was going on here, it slipped away from him. There were two or three different conversations tangled up together all at once in these little notes Tommy passed him. Picking apart the snarled knot of it might be beyond him, but he didn’t have nothing else to do, and he’d always loved a good riddle.

“What was under the coal?” _The_ January, he’d said. He’d used those words in his earlier note, too. But he’d also mentioned the New Year and gotten worked up when Alfie’d told him the date. “January the month or one of your fucking boats, mate?”

He’d shoved his sleeves back up again, Tommy. Unbuttoned a couple more buttons at his throat, revealing nothing but skin. He didn’t seem to be wearing an undershirt, which was another oddity, especially for fucking February. A mottled flush had crawled up his neck as they spoke, and at the questions one hand chopped through the air in a gesture Alfie couldn’t interpret other than frustration.

“_Yes_,” he said, insistent. His next note was quicker.

> opium. 7 tonnes. under the coal.

“Fucking hell, Tommy.” Alfie didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled. “So what was meant to happen at the New Year? Delivery?”

Something went hollowed-out behind Tommy’s eyes. He resumed his impression of a statue for a moment while the ticking clock filled the dead air. Then he went for the balcony doors. Twisted and rattled the handles as if he thought they might be locked, stumbling back a little when they opened towards him freely. Next thing Alfie knew he’d dissolved into the darkness outside, a cold blast of February air filling the room in his wake.

Fuck.

Took a bit but eventually the chill set in, so Alfie hauled himself up out of the chair with a grunt, not even hiding it, because fuck but he needed a break. Sure, he’d spent months thirsting for any disruption of the afterlife’s strict monotony, but now it had come he’d found he lacked the stamina. He considered just turning in, leaving Tommy to his silent contemplation of the night sea, but a mad combination of lingering curiousity and a nagging sort of unease had settled under his skin. Marie would be home soon enough and might take up sentry duty if he sweetened it for her. Didn’t appear that Tommy himself ever intended to sleep again, immune as he was to the frailties of mere mortals.

“It’s fucking freezing, mate,” he said as he stepped over _Lethe_ and into oblivion. “Or is it the other way round? Maybe crossing this threshold is _aletheia_ instead, right, the undoing of oblivion.” Fuck, he’d said that part aloud. Hadn’t meant to. Happened when he was overtired, this losing hold of the connection between his thoughts and his mouth. Got him in trouble sometimes with Marie, who’d learnt to ignore most of what he said after eight in order to maintain any peace.

Tommy shifted at his voice, emerging a fraction of a degree from the black on black of night. Light flooding out from the sitting room traced a thin line along the knife edge of one cheekbone, his eyes still lost to the dark.

“I was in Vienna once, after the war,” Alfie said, leaning against the marble, back to the waves, arms crossed over his chest against the chill. “Took in a show of fancy art they was trying to sell to the toffs. The _avant-garde_ and all that shit. Full of the Bosch, right, this being Vienna, but the fuckers could paint. More interesting than the crap they got hanging in the National Gallery, innit. There was one bloke, did these pictures of himself, not a stitch on him, all scrawny lines and tortured expressions. Died of Spanish Flu at twenty-eight.”

Silence.

“Right. You coming in?”

“No.” Toneless and barely audible over the crash of the water hitting the sand.

“Well, if you want company, it’s going indoors where the temperature registers on the fucking thermometer.” Alfie pushed off from his marble support but didn’t follow through. He didn’t know what the hell stopped him; just that the air on the balcony was all fucking wrong, somehow too still despite the wind whipping off the waterfront. When he started to speak, he didn’t have a definite idea where he was going, no clue as to a destination, but it didn’t stop him. Never had. “I woke up out there on that beach, mate, and after I realized this was still Margate and not hell, I cursed the name Tommy Shelby.”

Movement beside him. Tommy was fiddling with something, looking down at one hand, but he’d stuck to the corner of the balcony left too dark for Alfie to make out details.

He couldn’t quite keep the residue of old, bitter anger from his voice.“Yeah. Fucking _shot me in the face_ then didn’t fucking check to make sure you’d finished the job, did you?”

Nothing.

“Hmm. Well after that I weren’t capable of much thought, right, between the pain and the fucking morphine, ‘til I realized you’d taken both my dog _and_ my left eye. Don’t suppose I mentioned the eye in my letter.” He waited a moment before continuing but there was no response. “I’d painted a picture for you where I’d be after that fight, made it obvious, not like one of them paintings I saw in Vienna. Told myself it was the honorable thing to do. Truth was I just wanted it to be over. I was tired, mate, and I didn’t figure it would be a difficult choice for you after what I done.”

Two months since Tommy’s first visit had shook loose all this shit again. It’d been long enough to come to some measure of enlightenment about the matter, he supposed. Were he another man altogether and a more devout one to boot he might have asked for forgiveness. Weren’t the right time of year for all that, and besides, the resentment hadn’t quite left him even now.

“Cursed your name for a year after I woke up. Couldn’t comprehend why you hadn’t done it, you know, after I’d given you good reason. There I was, left worse off than I’d started, all because of Tommy Shelby’s sloppy fucking trigger finger.”

The sliver of light that had sketched the side of Tommy’s face had disappeared. It was like speaking to a void, to an empty well, to a hole dug in the ground.

“Confession’s another one of your people’s useful inventions, innit. Though you yourself are a nonbeliever, am I right?”

There was a stirring of fabric from the dark. “Yeah.”

“So rejecting a higher authority, you’re free of the need to weigh any prohibitions against just doing the fucking job yourself, hm?”

No answer. The black horse came back to him then, the black horse and the final bang.

“Yeah,” Alfie sighed. “Alright. Come inside, Tommy, and I’ll let you curse my name later. Only fair.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see the chapter end notes if you'd like a warning more specific than is in the story tags.

By the time he’d shut the balcony doors behind them, Alfie’s fingers and nose had started to go numb from the cold, though once fully illuminated again he found Tommy painted with a sheen of sweat. He wouldn’t sit. Rubbing at the stubbly top of his head, he took a drink of his tea, set it back down. Picked the cup back up again and carried it with him on an inspection of the room’s perimeter. After he’d made a double circuit he disappeared down the hall again and was back a moment later, empty handed, spots of water soaked into his shirt. Later, much later, Marie would stumble on his teacup in the lavatory, left on the sink next to the soap.

The agitation was unsettling in a man who usually held himself with a studied sort of stillness no matter the situation. Something had happened out in the dark, some unseen border crossed. Tommy yanked at his open collar like it was choking him. Lit up then stubbed out a series of cigarettes, toying with something in his trouser pockets as he smoked. Picked up one of Alfie’s books and opened it, scanned a few pages, then dropped it again with a huff. 

“Lost your spectacles, hm?” More likely had them taken away. 

But Tommy’d already moved on. Carried the notebook around with him, pausing to scribble every so often, but failed to hand off any notes to Alfie, didn’t seem aware any longer Alfie was even in the room with him. After a good hour of this he widened his prowling to include the hall and the kitchen, though he hadn’t seemed to have noticed Alfie’s office or the rest of the house as yet. 

Weren’t nothing Alfie could think to do about it, so he lit his second-favorite pipe and settled in with his novel, or made the attempt. Hard to read with the distraction of a man on his own personal forced march around your sitting room. As the clock struck ten Alfie caught himself listening for Marie’s return, then frowned. Waiting for his fucking nurse to come and take this problem off his hands when he’d already made promises to her about the situation, hell if he weren’t a hypocrite. A fucking exhausted hypocrite, yeah, he’d admit that much gladly, he’d take any tongue-lashing she wanted to give him long as he got to go to bed. After the chimes quit their echoing Alfie realized he’d lost track of Tommy and that things had gotten quiet, no sound of shoes on their endless tread through the house. Fuck.

“Thomas?” Levering himself upright was taking more and more effort; at this rate he was gonna need to dig his cane out of the closet just to get up and down. Once he was vertical the room swam around him, a little blurry. One of the consequences of his Cyclopean state was his good eye gave out on him a great deal earlier than it used to, a horse hitched to a dead partner and still trying to haul a full wagon.

Alfie made his slow way down the hall, checking the lavatory, until he reached the kitchen. Where he discovered Tommy rooted where he stood as if he’d just turned away from the sink at a sound from behind him, empty glass forgotten in one white knuckled hand, eyes pressed closed. A bead of sweat meandered down his temple and the tight line of his jaw, and Alfie could see more gathered in the hollow of his throat as he swallowed.

“Tommy.” 

His head shook, very slightly, but Alfie weren’t sure it was aimed his way. 

“You come in to get some water, yeah?” Got a tiny shake of the head again, though it was obvious that’s what he’d been doing before whatever… this was.

Alfie stepped closer, cautiously, and took the glass from his hand. Filled it at the tap and held it out, but Tommy still hadn’t opened his eyes. 

“There something in the room with us, mate?”

Tommy took a quick breath. “Yeah,” he said, strained. 

This close up Alfie could feel the heat radiating off him, and swore. Tommy flinched away from him a little at the sound, fumbling in his pocket. He seemed to have lost the notebook somewhere in his travels from room to room. 

“Same thing you saw before?”

Tommy swallowed again. Nodded, then shook his head. Not quite the same, maybe. Lenny’s waking nightmares had always been the same in every detail; Alfie weren’t sure what to make of one that shifted. Tommy’s head tilted a little, as if he was straining to hear something.

“They talking to you?”

“No,” Tommy said, but it was edged with something like pleading and seemed more like he was answering whatever voice he was listening to rather than Alfie.

“Maybe,” Alfie started, at a loss. “Maybe if you come back to my sitting room with me, yeah, it’ll busy itself with the pots and pans and leave you be.”

It was entirely nonsense. But Tommy nodded and took a stumbling step forward, eyes still closed, as if he intended to make the journey blind. 

“You gonna open your eyes, mate, or…” Tommy ignored him, groping with one hand until he found the closest solid object, which happened to be Alfie’s shoulder. “Right, okay. C’mon then.” 

When, halfway down the hall, Tommy’s hand dropped from his shoulder, Alfie let it go without commentary. Back in the sitting room again, Tommy staggered to his armchair and dropped into it, covering his face. After a moment he leaned back, head tipped against the cushion, staring up at the ceiling.

Alfie didn’t ask what he’d seen, but whatever it was, it seemed to have both remained in the kitchen and drained away whatever fuel had driven his previous manic patrol. Should have been easier to go back to reading now that he’d finally settled in one place, but somehow wasn’t. Something kept driving Alfie to meandering commentary instead.

“Seventh circle of Hell is Violence, right,” he said, peering over the top of his book. “An act which you and I, being who we are, have some familiarity with, many times over in fact. Violence against neighbors, you know, straightforward, innit. Violence against God, against Nature and Art: sounds more fanciful than it is, those’re just your blasphemers, Sodomites and usurers. Given the obsessions of the Church, it’s only to be expected in their Hell.” Tommy’s eyes were closed again, but he was still listening, Alfie thought. Couldn’t be certain of course, but the silence had a listening quality to it. “And the last one’s violence against your own self. Wouldn’t think God would give a fuck about that compared to all the other shit people done to each other, but according to Dante, extinguishing yourself is an offence against the Almighty who took time out of his busy schedule to give you form.”

It was an hour shy of midnight. Marie was taking her time at the pictures, wasn’t she; maybe it’d been a double feature. Maybe she had a lad who was sweet on her. She’d been married, Marie, and he’d survived the war only to die in the plague of 1918, years before Alfie had ever needed her services. Across the room Tommy’d seemed to have at last found some kind of peace, his hands resting loosely in his lap, chest rising and falling slowly as if he was sliding into sleep. If Alfie kept talking maybe he’d drop all the way off. Not as if this thought was motivated by altruism, neither: he was dead tired. With his troublesome guest sent off to the Land of Nod, maybe he could catch a few hours of rest himself.

Hell wasn’t your usual bedtime story, but they weren’t your usual sort of men, were they. 

“The second round of the seventh circle’s a forest,” Alfie continued, “where every man who’s offed himself is turned into a tree. Fucking trees, if you can picture it, trees that can talk, yeah, but only if someone breaks off a branch and makes ‘em bleed first.”

There was more he could have said about all that -- always more, he hadn’t even got to the fucking Harpies, had he -- but there was Marie, coming in the front door. Alfie pushed up from the couch and made it to his feet with too much effort by far and stood a moment looking down at Tommy. His head had fallen to the side, the muscles in his face gone lax, making it really fucking obvious that even at his most stuporous he’d still been high-strung with tension. 

“Mr. Solomons, you’re still up,” Marie said from the hall, mildly scolding. She’d put away her hat and coat, Marie, and was still holding her handbag.

“Yeah, that I am.” With a last glance at Tommy, who appeared to actually be asleep, Alfie left the room to follow Marie into the kitchen where she was pouring herself a glass of milk. “Look, Marie--”

“And your guest is still here, I see.”

“That’s what I was wanting to discuss, hm, before you turn in. I know what I said earlier so I’ll save you the trouble of repeating it back to me, but being a medical professional I’d like to get your educated opinion on a matter.”

“A matter concerning Mr. Shelby?” she asked cooly, sipping her milk.

“It’ll be worth an extra week’s coin to you, as I understand this is above and beyond the terms of our contract as negotiated previously--”

Marie sighed and set her glass down on the counter, crossing her arms over her chest. “What is it, then? Seems calm enough, at the moment.”

Alfie rubbed at his forehead. “Yeah, for the moment. I may have too casually dismissed your apprehensions, you know, because it’s been a night. But what I wanted to ask was whether you would give some attention to my guest’s physical form, because it seems to have taken a turn to the feverish.”

Marie straightened, her dubious expression gone suddenly intent. “How long ago did this start?”

“Now I look back on it he’s been shedding clothes like a tart all evening and returned sweating from his contemplation of the Arctic Circle. But I first realized he’d transformed into a radiator about an hour ago. Maybe a little more.”

“And he’s been agitated?” she demanded.

“Well, yeah, I mean he started out quiet as a fucking dormouse and then as the night went on he started pacing the place like a doped up racehorse--”

“Seeing things yet? Vomiting?”

Alfie stilled. Marie had left for her night out before Tommy’d had his first visitation. Whatever was on his face must have been enough, because Marie gave him a tight nod. 

“So you was right about the asylum. Near as I can gather, if Ollie’s intelligence is correct, he was in Bedlam until a couple of days ago. Probably exposed to all manner of plagues, could be flu--”

Marie shook her head impatiently. “Did Ollie say how long he was in Bedlam?”

“Yeah, uh, couple of months, roughly.”

Marie was frowning as if she’d done a whole column of accounting and come to a likely sum. One that put the books in the red. “If he was in Bedlam, they were likely sedating him,” she said.

“Ollie did say they was drugging him to sleep, but--”

“Deep sleep therapy, it’s a common enough treatment. And he’s been out only a matter of days?”

“Yeah.”

But Marie had pushed past him and was already heading back towards the sitting room before he could ask her what the fuck any of that had to do with the fever. Must have aired those thoughts with his mouth again, because she was asking more questions, bent over Tommy, one hand running along his forehead and neck, his wrist gripped in the other, taking his pulse. He hadn’t stirred at the touch. 

“Was he certified or a voluntary patient?”

“I dunno, Marie, what--”

“Under the care of a doctor when he left?”

Alfie frowned. “Don’t think it was an official process, his exit from Bedlam. Marie, you’ve clearly come to some kind of professional conclusions, and--”

Marie had dropped Tommy’s wrist and was patting him firmly on one cheek, not quite a slap. “Mr. Shelby. Wake up now. Can you hear me?” She pinched one of his earlobes, hard, and that got him sluggishly stirring, eyelids fluttering, but he still didn’t rouse. She turned to Alfie. “If they were sedating him for long enough and it’s been days without, he’s going through withdrawal.” She’d fallen into the knife-edged focus he remembered from when he’d come down with pneumonia, early on in their contract. 

“Right, well, yeah, that’ll be a rough go of it, when you brought me down from all that morphine it weren’t a fucking treat, but--”

She shook her head, impatient. “S’not the same. You can’t stop all at once, something like this. It’s more like booze, it’s deadly. The fever will keep climbing, he’ll seize, his heart will--”

“Fuck me, alright, you’ve painted the picture vivid enough, what can you--”

“He needs to be in a hospital,” she started, but he could tell she was already making alternate plans in her head.

“Look, Marie, being a man of many occupations, some more legitimate than others, I dunno what Mr. Shelby here was up to before he paid me this visit. If there’s any way to treat this without--”

Movement on the chair between them, and they both looked down. Tommy’s eyes were half open, heavy lidded and bloodshot, his head wobbling drunkenly as he lifted it. He tried and failed to sit up, letting out a rough impatient huff like a horse held back from the starting line. 

“I’ve some phenobarbital left from when you needed it to sleep,” Marie said, staring at him over Tommy’s head, doing more calculations, adding things up. “It should knock the worst of it back long enough to cool him down. But dealing with this is worth a year’s bloody pay, Alfie Solomons.”

“Done.” 

She gave him a nod and hurried off. 

Tommy had managed to straighten a bit in the chair, peering around the room with a flat lack of interest before he leaned forward and started a drowsy, ponderous attempt at standing. He got himself halfway up before tilting to the side and falling heavily, only to catch himself on the arm of the chair with one hand. If Alfie hadn’t known better he’d have assumed an entire bottle of whiskey lay somewhere in his recent past.

“Tommy,” Alfie hesitated. The back of his shirt was soaked through, sticking to his skin, but he didn’t seem to be sweating any longer, his face blotchy red again. “Look, Marie says you’re in a bad way, might be best if you wait for her to get back, right, with--”

Tommy scooped up his cap, left abandoned on the table since the previous evening, and shoved it down over his bare skull until it shaded his eyes. Had more trouble with the waistcoat; his attempts to find the openings for his arms would have been comical, maybe, some other day, but Alfie weren’t laughing. After a moment he dropped it to the floor and started towards the hall without giving his jacket a second glance. Fuck.

“Shelby,” Alfie barked. Maybe it was the tone, Alfie’d been a captain in the King’s fucking Army once upon a fucking time, but Tommy paused and turned back, eyes finding Alfie with little recognition in them, unfocused and dark. “You leaving, mate?”

“Yeah.” His jaw was set in a hard line. 

“Right, yeah, okay, where are you planning to go at this hour? No taxis out this far. And even if you walk all the way into town, there’s no trains ‘til morning.”

For the first time Tommy’s mute state seemed more confused than anything else, as if he couldn’t follow all those words at once. Maybe he hadn’t known where he was heading, maybe he’d just got the impulse to leave. Whatever it was, the pause was long enough for Marie to reappear.

“Mr. Shelby, why don’t you come sit down for a minute, eh?” Marie kept her voice even and calm. Then, to Alfie: “The couch would be best for this.”

Right. Tommy stood where he was, eyeballing Marie uncertainly, as if he didn’t remember who she was neither. “No,” he said. He weaved a little to the side, though, and Alfie thought it likely he wouldn’t remain upright for much longer. 

It was like wrapping your bare hand around the handle of a cast iron pan fresh off the stovetop -- didn’t burn you outright but the heat was unmistakable. Alfie got a loose hold around Tommy’s shoulder and eased him back into the sitting room. Despite what he’d said, he went docile enough, stumbling a little, his breaths coming quick and shallow as if walking across the room had used up all his remaining strength. Alfie got him to the couch just in time, because his knees buckled and it took both him and Marie scurrying to make sure he didn’t hit the floor. As it was he sprawled along the cushions at a graceless angle, nearly horizontal, arms and legs akimbo. 

“Alright mate, just… stay still a minute, yeah? Don’t think you’re up to making the trip to town just yet.” Didn’t much seem aware of nothing, Tommy, but his eyes were still open and he shoved back weakly against Alfie’s attempts to move him into a less precarious perch. 

“Mr. Shelby,” Marie was saying. She’d taken a seat next to him on the edge of the couch. “Mr. Shelby, look at me, you’re very ill.” Tommy gave her an owlish blink. “You’ve a high fever. You were on a medication long enough your body needs it now, and without more this fever will kill you.”

Something was going on in that head. Alfie could see jammed up gears turning, hitting an obstacle, turning a bit more. 

“I’ve something that will help, I’m just going to give you a quick shot, you see?” She held out a little bottle and a syringe. 

“_No._” Tommy put every bit of cold command he had left to him into the word, as if she were one of his fucking men. He struggled to push up from the couch but lacked the strength to get anywhere, face marked with brittle, despondent lines, that Bosche’s fucking paintings come to life. 

“Tommy, mate, Marie’s looked after me near three years now and my only complaint is her habit of argument and the way she prepares my eggs.” 

Tommy was staring up at him like he knew him again, wide-eyed and betrayed. “No.” Then, “Stop. _Stop_.”

Fucking hell. “You sure he can’t just… gut it out on his own? He’s a tenacious sort of lad, Tommy, shoulda been dead five times over by this point. Like a fucking alley cat.”

Marie’d gone steely as the battlefield nurse she’d been. “He’s minutes away from a febrile seizure, Mr. Solomons. Likely cardiac arrest after that. You want a corpse on your hands, that’s your decision, but you’ll be on your own to dispose of it.”

Fuck. “What d’you need me to do?” 

“Thigh’s best for this,” she said. “Get hold of him so I can pull his trousers down. He’ll probably fight you a bit.”

Maybe he lacked imagination, but of all the excitement Alfie had wished for over the past year of his recovery, even in his worst moments of dreaming up every sort of elaborate revenge on the man for having left him still living and dogless to boot, holding Tommy Shelby down so his nurse could stick him with a needle was not a thing that had ever crossed his mind. 

“Yeah, alright. Fuck. Give me a minute.” He staggered a bit himself, dead exhausted, because it was after fucking midnight, wasn’t it, and he’d only caught a few hours the night before. Hadn’t even had a nap today. Circling behind the couch, he hunched down and got a good grip across Tommy’s chest with one arm, patting awkwardly at his shoulder with his free hand.

“S’not so bad,” he said, “Marie here has given me countless fucking shots. Morphine, mostly. Got good technique, Marie. Quick about it, if you let her.”

One of Tommy’s arms was pinned between his body and the back of the couch, but he’d managed to work his other hand into his pocket, and before Alfie realized what was happening he’d pulled out a blade of some sort. All Alfie saw was the flash as it darted towards his face. Yanking his head back just in time to keep his good eye, he gained himself a scratch down his forearm before he could release his hold on Tommy’s chest and scramble free of his reach. 

Marie was still perched there by his knees, calm as could be, like maybe she’d missed the sudden turn of the situation at hand.

“Marie! Fuck--”

“That’s my bloody paring knife.” She sounded more annoyed than frightened, which struck Alfie as fucking suicidal. “Must’ve nicked it from the kitchen.”

Tommy’d made it halfway upright, the knife gripped in one shaking fist. The effort had left him gasping, the whites of his eyes showing as he tried to keep both of them in view, which would have been impossible unless he had an extra eye in the back of his fucking head, but he was giving it a shot. 

“Tommy, fucking hell, mate!” Blood was already dripping down his wrist. It weren’t serious, but it stung.

“Give me that,” Marie snapped, and when he slashed towards her, slowed by fever and fatigue and clumsier than he should have been, she caught his wrist in an iron grip and plucked the knife from him with her other hand. Alfie took the opportunity to grab at his torso again, struggling to hold on as Tommy thrashed and let out a wordless howl of rage. It didn’t last long. He’d used what strength he had left to him in his attempt to slit Alfie’s throat, and in a matter of minutes he’d sunk into himself, wheezing, fight gone feeble. Another moment and he was mostly still. 

“Let’s give this another try, shall we?” Marie set the paring knife aside and took up her syringe again. 

Alfie shifted so he could keep hold of Tommy’s chest and grab his wrist, using the weight of his body to pin him to the couch. This time Tommy didn’t try to stop Marie from sliding his trousers down past his hips to his knees. Lucky, Alfie supposed, he weren’t wearing belt or suspenders and the trousers were a loose fit, because they went easily enough. Then both he and Marie froze, because the top of Tommy’s right thigh was mottled with patches of purple and blue.

“Alright,” Marie said, soft in the way she’d only got in Alfie’s worst moments of infirmity. “Looks like they stuck you plenty on this side, yeah? And weren’t too gentle about it, were they. We’ll just use the other one.”

“Please,” Tommy rasped. He’d given up trying to pull away from Alfie’s hold and was watching, dull-eyed, as Marie filled the syringe.

“Sorry, mate,” Alfie found himself saying into Tommy’s ear as he held him down. “Only one dead man allowed in this fucking house. Call me a coward, right, curse my name all you like, but you want to die, Tom, you can do it when you’re not broiling from the inside out and can make a fucking clear-headed choice about it. And you can do it someplace besides my fucking sitting room.”

Tommy shut his eyes and went spiritless in Alfie’s grasp. Marie found the spot she wanted on his unmarked thigh, smoothed the skin taut with one practiced hand, and plunged the needle straight into the muscle. Alfie winced, but Tommy didn’t react to the jab. Was old hat to him by now, from the looks of it.

“Right,” Alfie said, finally, after Marie had finished. “How long ‘til we know…”

Marie shrugged. “Don’t know what dose they had him on so I gave him enough to put him out until morning. Keep him calm until it can work, we’ll still need to cool him down.” With that she pulled his trousers up back over his shorts a bit for modesty’s sake and disappeared.

Alfie let Tommy’s wrist go and made sure he weren’t about to slide off the couch before he released hold on him altogether. It was too soon for the sedative to have a grip on him yet, Alfie knew that much from experience, but when Tommy’s eyes finally slid open again the empty stare was back, as if he’d left the room without bothering to take his body with him.

“Well,” Alfie started, then trailed off. 

Two new words, they’d gotten out of Tommy tonight. Two new fucking words, after more than a day. 

Alfie’d rather he’d kept them to himself. No and yeah was just fine on their own, weren’t they. Perfectly useful words. 

Maybe there weren’t much more than that important enough to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for physically restraining and medicating a character against their will, as well as implied past medical trauma. It's arguably medically necessary and the intention is to save their life but the circumstances/description of how it plays out might be triggering. 
> 
> Please feel free to message me in comments if you'd like more detail, or for me to summarize anything you'll need to know for the rest of the story if you'd rather skip it.


	6. Chapter 6

The next stretch of hours passed in a haze while they fought to bring Tommy’s temperature to heel. Acting as Marie’s assistant, Alfie followed her every direction without question or comment, too spent for words of his own. Maybe this was what had happened to Tommy, right; get bone-weary enough and the words just left you.

Marie might only come up to the tip of his nose at best, a slight-looking thing, but she’d made a career of tossing men twice her size from stretcher to bed to wheelchair and back, so when they lifted their unconscious patient from the couch she was the one to grip him under the arms while Alfie got him by the knees. Somehow between them they lugged him, trailing limbs and all, into the guestroom, dumping him on the bed Marie had already stripped of blankets and covered with thick towels. Alfie propped him up, hot forehead resting on one shoulder while Marie wrestled him out of his shirt. Their eyes locked at another ugly patch of bruising spread down his back and side before they moved on, Alfie helping her with his shoes and garters and hose so they could pull his legs free of his trousers. When they did something shiny dropped to the mattress between them.

Marie got to it first then held it out to him, gone grimly challenging. “Not a danger, eh?”

It was a shard of glass, mirrored and long as his palm, ending in a razor-edged point.

“Didn’t use it on us, did he?” Alfie took it from her and set it on the bedside table.

Marie’s glare was incandescent. “Holy Jesus.”

Alfie couldn’t help but admire the resourcefulness. “Lucky he didn’t slice his fucking balls off, all this shit in his pockets.” Would have cut his own hands to the bone had he tried to use it.

“Mr. Solomons--”

“Had this most of the day, Marie. Plenty of time to murder us if that’s what he was after. That back there? That was fucking self-defense.”

Alfie frowned down at the unconscious man while he waited for Marie’s nursing instincts to override her distrust. Didn’t take long, did it; she was a professional and worth every shilling he’d ever paid her and besides, Tommy was filled with enough sedative to take down a horse. Under Marie’s direction they wrapped him in sheets and towels soaked in ice-cold water. Pointed an electric fan at him and opened wide the room’s two windows to the freezing night air. Changed out the wet cloths when they warmed through, working in tandem to roll his body this way and that or sponge down his head and face and neck with more cold water. Marie chipped a cup of ice from the icebox and slipped small flakes past Tommy’s lips to try to get some water into him. They waited, and watched, and the threatened seizures never came, and his heart kept beating, and somewhere round the chime of three from the grandfather clock Marie fell into one of the chairs they’d dragged into the room from the kitchen and declared him stable enough.

“Still a bit warm, but the worst of it’s passed. Help me get him into dry things and then you go on to bed, Mr. Solomons.”

For once he didn’t argue.

Awakened at fucking dawn after the night he’d had, Alfie Solomons lay in his bed for a good long minute and stared at the blank expanse of his ceiling, willing himself back to sleep. The house was still as the grave so it hadn’t been any external interruption to his slumber, no, what had forced him out of his exhausted state was the complaints of his body. His bladder first and most urgent. His back a lesser but nagging ache, waiting to take over, stretched beyond its already limited capacity by the strain of hauling around a full grown man like a sack of fucking bricks. His head, just for the hell of it. Seemed every bone in his skeleton wanted to bring a gripe to his attention.

Might as well admit he weren’t getting back to the blissful nothing where the demands of the flesh and the worries of the day let him be.

He took care of his body’s whinging best he could without resorting to Marie’s bag of tricks. Needed his mind clear as it could be, didn’t he, given the unknown state of the situation currently occupying his guest bedroom. Fuck. What had started out as a bit of sport -- a mystery to unravel, a change up from his humdrum routine -- had gotten out of hand last night, hadn’t it. He’d taken it all with too much fucking nonchalance, sure Marie had been exaggerating in her misgivings. Unlike Marie’s fears, though, the clearest conclusion he’d come to was that it’d been Tommy who’d borne the brunt of his miscalculations.

He didn’t yet know what to make of that. Couldn’t help but harbour a sliver of resentment, that Tommy’d brought all this to his door, right, to disrupt his peaceful death. Still couldn’t wrap his head around the question of fucking _why_.

Maybe it was payback, yeah, for the beach, for putting on Tommy something Alfie should have had the fucking stones to do himself. Tried to find a loophole in the old prohibitions, but God always knew the truth, didn’t he. Yeah, God always knew.

Looked like he’d accepted some kind of responsibility for the man without ever having been asked about it. But no, he could be honest now, in the space of his own head. He could have told Tommy to take his strange silences someplace else that first afternoon, he could have called the man’s family after he’d come unglued to the radio broadcast, he could have followed Marie’s advice and got him to a hospital last night. That he hadn’t done any of those things was his own fucking choice, wasn’t it. So maybe he was asking the wrong _why_, right. Maybe the why he should be asking was aimed at himself.

Fuck, that was too much for a man to take on before he’d even had his breakfast.

Marie had tidied the guest room after Alfie had left it last, restoring it from the emergency-ward state it’d taken on to a proper bedroom once more. The windows had been closed against the chill and the curtains drawn, the electric fan left unplugged in one corner, the bedside table cleared of improvised weaponry. She’d left her patient a pitcher of water and a full glass, but it looked untouched. The patient himself was still heavily asleep, or else unconscious. Hard to tell the difference, innit, between the needle and his body’s attempt to roast itself. Curled on his side facing the doorway with quilts pulled up to his bare shoulders, his eyes lost deep in the caves of their sockets, there was a sallow look to him like one of the bodies you stumbled over in the trenches left stuck to rot in the mud.

Still breathing, though, right. After all the trouble he’d put them through, it was the least he could fucking do.

“You mentioned Ollie has Mr. Shelby’s file from Bedlam?”

Seated at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, Marie had been up for some time or had never slept at all, and was apparently full of the practical sort of questions his brain was entirely unprepared to consider, bent on the philosophical as it had been. Alfie couldn’t remember if he’d told her that fact or not but the previous evening was something of a blur so he might well have done so. He fell into the other chair and poured himself a cup from her teapot.

“When next you speak to him,” she continued, “ask whether there’s any information on what they were dosing Mr. Shelby with, and how much.”

“Hmm.” Alfie found himself still short of a need to vocalize. Maybe Tommy’s affliction was catching.

Marie had turned her critical eye on him. “And how does this morning find you, Mr. Solomons? Did you sleep any?”

“Seems like a question I should be asking yourself, right, seeing how you was still at it when I retired.”

“After France I can take one night burning the candle at both ends, can’t I.”

He didn’t have nothing to say to that. She’d been as close to the fighting as it got for nurses, Marie, close enough for the near miss of the occasional shell. Sometimes he forgot.

“What should we, um,” Alfie scratched at his beard, muddled and uncertain still. “Well, right, what should we expect, after the… hmm, after last night’s trials?”

Marie sipped at her tea. “Won’t know until he wakes up.”

“And how soon do you--”

She shrugged. “The sedative should start to wear off in a few hours. After that, we’ll see. He’ll need more, to prevent the withdrawal returning.”

Alfie let himself rub at his eyes. Fuck, but he was tired. “You mean we’ll have to stick him again?”

“Hopefully not.” They shared a moment, he and Marie, something uncomfortable sitting between them, like a body they hadn’t decided whether to burn or bury. “I can get me hands on some tablets, if you get information enough from Ollie. I’ll say they’re for you.”

Relief flooded him. “And you think he’ll take those tablets?”

Marie sighed. “All’s I can do is explain what will happen if he goes without again.”

“Yeah, alright.” He pushed himself up from the table with effort. “Suppose I should roust Ollie from his bed, then.”

“After that you’ll have your massage, and a proper breakfast.” It drove him wild that she didn’t have a hair out of place or a line marring her even, composed features after the night they’d had. Wasn’t that she looked fresh as a daisy, no, but compared to the wreck he knew he looked it were something to be envied.

“Hmm. Don’t think I’m paying you enough, Marie.”

“I’ll be sure to inform you when next my rates increase.” Her frown followed him as he retrieved the paring knife from the drawer of cutlery. “The way things have gone, you’ll need to consult your accountant.”

Tommy hadn’t moved, but the blankets still rose and fell evenly with his breathing, so Alfie figured that was the best that could be fucking hoped for at the moment.

He hesitated a moment, overruling the insistently pressing objections of what was left of his saner side, before he set the paring knife on the bedside table next to the water glass and shut the door behind him when he left.

Alfie found himself putting off the call, shuffling through papers in his office, things that needed his sudden urgent attention, right, routine tasks he’d neglected for too long. Ollie was a perceptive sort, wasn’t he. Needed to be, to have worked at Alfie’s right hand for long as he had, and one of his many qualities was an uncanny ability to not just suss out Alfie’s mood but the source of that mood. Back in the bakery days this had manifested in a habit of anticipating whatever need Alfie himself hadn’t quite come to terms with requiring; these days it took form in the occasional awkwardly personal question to do with the state of his health.

Eventually Ollie was going to wonder why the fuck Alfie was looking for all of this information about Tommy Shelby, was the thing. Couldn’t be helped, could it. So after a half hour’s dithering Alfie directed the girl at the exchange to get Ollie on the line.

“Yeah, boss.” He sounded too fucking awake for seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. Eager, even. Ran ahead without waiting for Alfie to form a question. “Found the man you asked about, the orderly. Waiting for a train to Liverpool last night, everything he owned in two suitcases.”

“Fuck me,” Alfie managed. Of the tasks he’d given Ollie, he’d thought finding the orderly would be the longest shot. “When it comes time for your fucking bonus, Oliver, be sure to remind me of this moment.”

“He was carrying a ticket from the Cunard office on him, heading to New York.”

“And? You convinced him to delay his voyage?”

Ollie laughed. Fucking laughed, as if it had been a bit of a lark, tracking down this one man. “Had the cash on him to make a later reservation.”

“Did you relieve him of that burden?”

“Nah, wasn’t enough to be worth the trouble of robbing. Besides, he told me what I wanted to know.”

Sometimes Ollie liked to drag things out, when he was particularly proud of his own ingenuity. It wasn’t a trait Alfie had missed. “Ollie--”

“Yeah, okay. Here’s what he told me. The money was a bribe, right, to break out one of the patients. Didn’t have the first idea who ‘Mr. Jones’ was, and didn’t give a fuck, either. The arrangement was to have Jones declared dead and then smuggle him out of Bedlam, to be handed over to the man who’d bribed him.”

“Did he say who that man might be?”

“Took a bit of convincing, but yeah, some bloke called Strong. Claimed he was Jones’s uncle. Had another chap with him, big guy, but the orderly never caught his name. Jones was still drugged when Strong picked him up, ‘cause the orderly refused to deal with him otherwise, being certified and all. And that’s the last he knew about the matter. Decided to leave the country when the people sniffing around about the missing body showed up at his favorite pub Friday night.”

“And you was the first to get to him?”

“Oh, yeah. Made sure he got on his train, and arranged for someone to meet him in Liverpool to escort him safely to the docks.”

“Good man,” Alfie managed, impressed in spite of himself. “Right. That is certainly enlightening, innit.” Fuck, he’d nearly forgotten the information Marie wanted. “You still have that file on Mr. Jones?”

Ollie went quiet a moment. “Boss, I know asking why isn’t part of the deal, but--”

“You’re right about that, dead right, yeah, questions are not part of this arrangement. Or rather, the questions flow in one direction, Ollie, like the mythological river from which my house has taken its fucking name, and after those questions pass you by and you’ve supplied me with the answers, you’re to forget there was even anything asked of you in the first place.”

In the end Ollie’d read him what he wanted from the file, which he’d dutifully copied down despite most of it being no more intelligible to him than Greek.

“I’ll see what I can find out from Warwickshire,” Ollie said after he’d finished his dictation. “Look, I got you don’t want any questions from me, boss, but if there’s any chance the Peaky Blinders track him back to your place--”

Perceptive fucker, Ollie. “Never said Shelby was here, Ollie,” he said, very evenly, in the tone every man who’d ever worked for him knew not to cross.

“Course not.” Ollie sighed. “Marie’s still there, at least, right?”

“Yes, my fucking nurse is still in residence, probably wouldn’t leave at this point if I stopped paying her. Now, if that’s it, I’ve--”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ollie said, and then disconnected the call.

Distance and absence certainly wore away a man’s ability to intimidate his fucking employees properly, didn’t it.

Funny how much company had been provided by that silent ghost who’d haunted his sitting room. After Alfie handed off the information Ollie’d given him to Marie and submitted himself to her ministrations, had his aches rubbed with oil and his stomach filled, he found himself at a loss, on his own for the first time in two days. He took up residence on the balcony watching the tide finish its journey until restlessness got the better of him and curiousity sent him hunting for the notebook Tommy’d scribbled in during his endless pacing before everything went to shit last night. Took him a bit of time, right, but finally he found the thing left forgotten amongst the clutter on top of the piano.

He put something on the gramophone to fill the air and settled into Tommy’s armchair as if it might give him some kind of glimpse into the man’s head. Ollie’s report had left him unsettled. He’d recognized the name Strong, vaguely knew him as one of Tommy’s gang. Involved in the smuggling of Alfie’s rum back in the early days, piloting those boats of theirs down the canals from Birmingham. Chances were any given Peaky was related to the Shelbys somehow, yeah, but he’d never been quite certain if the man were family. Despite Ollie’s miraculous ferreting out of the orderly, how Tommy’d ended up in Bedlam in the first place and why Strong had resorted to bribing a man to free him remained maddeningly hidden. And he was no closer to sussing out how Tommy had ended up at his door after that.

Not much hope that anything this notebook contained would provide new intelligence, but Alfie opened it anyhow, flipping through the pages until he came across Tommy’s newly unfamiliar, ungainly scrawl. He frowned as he read the first passage. Seemed at first glance like Tommy’s attempt to get something clear in his own head, right, talking to himself in some sort of shorthand.

> Canals. <strike>drowned </strike>distribution by canal 4 days 4tonnes coal 7tonnes cargo x 3 £1,190,000 poplar to liverpool to San Francisco by ship
> 
> the january fucking january <strike>appeals and announcements</strike>
> 
> 4 days 4 tonnes of coal narrowboatto London 4 days 4 boats £250,000
> 
> Watery Lane Junction Main Line Aldersley Junction Stourbridge Locks Autherley Junction to Nantwich

The opium, obviously. Alfie whistled to himself. Had he been dealing directly with the Chinese gangs? Must have been, the amounts involved. Alfie’d never used the canal system himself but recognized some of the landmarks. Providing transport from London to Liverpool by way of his fucking canal boats, right, under the nose of the coppers. If it’d been him, he’d have been skimming at least a bit for his own distribution. Hard to resist, given the tonnage, but risky. Piss the Chinese off and you had a war on your hands and no more product to distribute. Seemed a tad too reckless for a Member of fucking Parliament to be involved directly, which meant Tommy had likely built in layers of distance and deniability to insulate himself. Maybe that’s where the traitor had come in.

Hm. January again. _Appeals and announcements_. And in one of his earlier notes, _it starts_, and something about birth. What starts? Something was to have happened at the New Year, right, and Alfie was no longer sure it had anything to do with the opium. After all, weren’t like MP Tommy Shelby would be announcing his entry into the opium business, now, would he. He was still missing something.

The next page was mostly more of the same at first, canal routes. And then it shifted, the pen marks going erratic and hard to read.

> grand union from poplar
> 
> limehouse cut
> 
> 3 locks at Calcutt 3 Judases each one thrice worse than Judas the Itchington Ten
> 
> 4 locks 6 locks 2 locks Budbrooke Junction 21 locks Hatton Top Lock 5 locks Bordesley junction Digbeth branch
> 
> 26 locks Autherley Junction to Nantwich <strike>passed by </strike>
> 
> <strike>january passed looking up at the fucking bridge it passed </strike>

Hmm. Judas. The traitor he’d mentioned before, yeah? But more than one? After that it got… he didn’t know what to make of it at all. Still read like Tommy talking to himself, yeah, or talking to _someone_, but it was all… scrambled up metaphors, maybe, was the closest Alfie could come. One thought bouncing off another and ricocheting in a whole new direction. Not a state Alfie was unfamiliar with from his own mind’s workings, but this was distilled down into personal references too obscure for him to follow.

> in the cut grace it’s in the blood in our blood
> 
> Arthurs aid it’sa boat. It tips.
> 
> & tips
> 
> A little little grave, an obscure grave
> 
> full of spooked horses & razor wire & latent content & oraculum
> 
> I find myself a traitor with the rest

Some of it seemed to be verse, yeah, familiar maybe, but Alfie couldn’t place it. The rest… spooked horses, he’d written that before. There was themes here, repeating themes, but deciphering it without more details was impossible.

The last page was nothing but two lines, struck through heavily with the pen:

> <strike>fuckingPurgatory</strike>
> 
> <strike>not dead</strike> <strike>but rotting now </strike>

Hmm. Whatever Tommy was seeing during his visitations maybe. Dead but not dead. Fuck. Tommy’d always been determinedly, _boringly_ concrete in his speech, even when he was threatening to blow your whole operation to the moon with a fucking grenade. Not one to spin out fanciful stories to make a point, Tommy Shelby. Whatever had happened, whatever it was he was trying to get down, it seemed to have undone his ability to express his thoughts in plain language. Alfie could sense a sort of logic to it all, a shifting pattern of some kind, but what it added up to escaped him.

And nothing about Mosley, still. Maybe that was a clue of sorts, that absence. Alfie had avoided asking about it directly after his reaction to the radio -- had avoided asking a lot of things directly, figured the facts would come out if he gave it time enough -- and he’d thought the unpuzzling of it all a good salve for the tiresome sameness of his days. But the stubborn gap between Mosley’s speech and Tommy’s reappearance in Margate had nearly resulted in his brain boiling inside his skull, hadn’t it.

There were questions needed to be answered now, yeah. No more avoiding it. Only complication was whether Tommy could fill in those blanks himself in a way Alfie could follow.

When he woke up, that was. Whenever he fucking woke up.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> see end notes for warnings specific to this chapter.

Marie must’ve collected Tommy’s things and left them for him in the guest room, because when Alfie glanced up at the sound of footsteps in the hall it was to see him pass by the doorway to the sitting room, fully dressed in the suit he’d been wearing for the past three days, cap pulled low. Before Alfie could catch up to the fact he was even fucking vertical, Tommy was out the door and gone. 

Fuck. _Fuck._

No chance Alfie’d get anywhere quickly enough to make chase, so he threw open the balcony doors and stepped outside in time to see Tommy clearing the little gate at the side of the house.

“Tommy! Fucking hell, mate, where the fuck--”

Tommy turned on a dime towards his voice and even from a distance Alfie could see the hostility radiating off him, obvious as the fever’d been last night. There was a glint of morning sun on something clenched in one of his fists, and Alfie didn’t need his binoculars to tell him it was the blade he’d left on the bedside table.

“You’ve got no fucking money, right, and unless things have changed dramatically in the last eight fucking hours you’re not about to sweet-talk yourself into a cab, just how far do you expect to get--”

Tommy put his back to Alfie and stalked past the balcony down the path to the beach, kicking at the sand as he went. Alfie didn’t bother to shout after him again, just watched as he walked directly to the edge of the fucking ocean until the waves was breaking against his shoes. He stood there for a long moment before turning back to the dry sand again, then he followed the waterline away down the shore. Eventually the stiff line of his shoulders shrank into a dark blob in the distance and then it was gone.

Well. That was that, then. Alfie left the balcony and shut the doors and stood in the middle of his sitting room for a moment, feeling a bit like a kite cut loose from its string, which was ridiculous, right, because that image was a better fit for Tommy, wasn’t it. 

“Oh, Mr. Solomons, there you are.” Marie came to a brisk stop just inside the doorway. “I spoke to Dr. Richards about the tablets, said you were going through a rough patch of insomnia, but seeing how it’s Sunday he can’t get us a bottle until tomorrow. But if Mr. Shelby--”

Alfie dropped onto the couch, rubbing at his forehead. “We won’t be needing those tablets after all, Marie, because Mr. Shelby has taken his leave of us.”

Marie got a skeptical sort of look, as if he was trying to pull one over on her. Turned on her heel and left, presumably to check the guest bedroom for herself. Returned soon enough and took a seat in the armchair across from him, flummoxed for the first time in his memory. 

“He just walked out?”

Alfie supposed whatever showed on his face told the story well enough. “Seems he recalled our sticking him with the needle last night, yeah, and weren’t waiting around for a repeat performance.”

Something like regret lined her mouth as she frowned. “If he’d let me explain--”

“Weren’t waiting around for explanations, neither.”

“It’ll just happen again.” Marie had gone soft, as if she was actually fucking worried. “Another day, he’ll be right back where he was last night.”

“Thought this turn of events would’ve given you more satisfaction,” Alfie said, dropping his hands to his lap. “Dangerous escapee from Bedlam and all, out of your hair.”

Marie’s lips pursed. “You’re paying me enough to deal with a whole ward of gangsters on me own, aren’t you.”

“Hmm. Yeah, suppose I am.”

They sat together while the clock struck nine, and then Marie stood, brushing her hands on her apron, brusque again. “There’s still time for me to make the late Mass. Would you like tea before I leave?”

And just like that, the wheels of Alfie’s Sunday fell into their usual, well-worn ruts.

Marie took herself off to church and back again, fixed him lunch, then after he’d eaten to her satisfaction, ordered him to take a nap. At a loss to find any good argument against the idea, he did as he was told and surprised his own self by falling into deep slumber almost as soon as he’d stretched out in his bed, only to be woken by a gentle shake of his shoulder and insistent call of his name some indeterminable time later. He rolled onto his back with a groan, blinking up at Marie, who stood over him with a wide-eyed astonishment about her that pressed his sleep-fogged brain to clear itself on a quicker schedule than it wished. 

“Fuck, Marie, what is it?” he managed, pushing himself up against the pillows.

“Mr. Shelby,” she said, and he sat up, not quite sharp yet but listening now, right. “He’s… well, he’s outside.”

“Fucking what? Outside, what does that fucking mean?”

“Come and see for yourself.” With that she left the room, expecting him to follow, which he did of course. Of course he fucking did, news like that. Sure enough, when she led him to the balcony doors there was a familiar shape dark against the glare of the afternoon sun out on the sand. 

“Don’t know how long he’s been out there.” She spoke as if afraid she’d startle him off, even through the glass. “But he wasn’t there last time I was in the room.” 

It was Tommy Shelby, right, in the fucking flesh. Sitting on the beach with his back to Alfie’s balcony, hunched against the incessant wind.

“Alright,” he said, scratching at his beard. “Alright. Marie, get me my coat, yeah?”

Despite the wind coming in off the shore, it weren’t as cold as he’d thought it’d be. Was almost pleasant out in the sun, in a way that held the faint promise of spring. Alfie trudged through the sand to where Tommy was sitting, no real plan in mind for what he should do or say, figuring the words would come to him when he needed ‘em, yeah, or else they wouldn’t. Couldn’t make things much worse than they’d already gotten, could he. Tommy didn’t look up when Alfie reached him, but he didn’t move away neither, so with a grunt of effort Alfie lowered himself down to sit next to him in the sand.

“You pull a runner on me now I’ll likely be stuck out here until Marie notices my absence, mate, so I’d appreciate a hand up first if you do decide to go.”

It’d been six hours since Tommy’d left. His shoes and the cuffs of his trousers were crusted with sand and dried salt and Alfie couldn’t see much of his eyes past the shadow thrown by his cap, but the fucking knife was still held at the ready in one hand. Didn’t look like much, the paring knife, just a tool he’d watched Marie use countless times to peel fucking potatoes; but she kept her knives sharp, Marie, and he had no doubt a man who sewed razors into his fucking cap could find a lethal use for it without much thought.

“Take in the sights, did you? Get down to Dreamland, ride the Joy Wheel and the Whip? Or maybe the Shell Grotto’s more to your taste, yeah, underground as it is.”

The rhythm of the waves hitting the sand could either relax a man or drive him fucking mad from the unceasing distraction. He wondered which it was for Tommy. As if considering making a go of mapping out the shore from the opposite direction he’d taken last time, Tommy tilted his head away from Alfie, reducing his view to the sharp edge of his jaw. When he shifted to grip one propped up knee with his empty hand, Alfie caught a flash of white cuff under the sleeve of his jacket, streaked brownish red along the inside of his wrist. 

“Margate, yeah. Upset some local purveyor of amusements, trying to cop a ride for free?” 

That got a reaction. Tommy sent him a quick glance from the side, a puzzled twist to his mouth, then followed Alfie’s nod to his stained cuff. A huff of air escaped him, untranslatable, as he passed the knife to his left hand, buried the blade to the hilt in the sand far from Alfie’s reach, and tugged the sleeve of his jacket down over the cuff to hide the blood.

Right.

“I dunno how much you recall ‘bout last night, mate, but the fact you feel it necessary to keep that fucking knife at the ready tells me you remember enough, yeah?” 

Tommy’d gripped the blade again as he spoke, this time with his left hand, with which he was no doubt just as skilled as his right. Alfie took that as confirmation.

“So let’s say our actions, Marie’s and mine, were meant with all good intention, given the urgency of the situation as we understood it. Don’t suppose that mattered much to you when we was holding you down, did it.”

“No.” It carried all the ire could be packed in a single syllable, but it was something. It was acknowledgment, anyhow. 

“Hm. Could’ve been handled better, last night. Could’ve given you time to think it over, or, you know. Whatever. It ain’t gonna happen like that again.” Alfie paused. “I been poked and prodded so much in the last few years I took it as a matter of course, you know, but I pay somebody to do all that shit, and I ain’t been locked up. Suppose it’s not the same, is it. Suppose if you was able you’d tell me to fuck off right about now.”

“Yes.” He hadn’t thought to bring Tommy’s notebook out with him, which limited his options for communication, but Tommy was nothing if not eloquent in his use of the tools left to him at the moment. Alfie hadn’t realized one word could convey that much bitterness.

“Yeah. Well. Deserved as it might be I do have to thank you for not taking your revenge on me with that blade today, Thomas, when you’re better positioned to actually do some damage.” 

Alfie ran out of steam in the face of the stiff silence at his side. It weren’t a thing that came natural to him, admitting when he’d done a man wrong. The last time he’d been faced with this sort of gnawing guilt -- Tommy waving a gun in his face and screaming at him about his boy -- the sensation had been so entirely foreign it’d been like a shockwave, a stunning sort of blow that left him scabbling for the shelter of his own righteous anger before he knew what’d hit him. That weren’t going to work here, was it, and he was too tired for all that shit now. Didn’t help that he couldn’t get the bruised length of Tommy’s thigh out of his head, the unmistakable evidence he’d been stuck over and over again with little care what it was doing to him. Or the way he’d said _please_. A man like Tommy Shelby, reduced to begging at Alfie’s hands. It weren’t a thing he wanted to see again.

“Marie says it’ll take a couple of weeks to get you off that shit, the dose they was giving you in Bedlam was so high, but she’s worked it all out. She’s got connections with the local medical establishment, they give her whatever she fucking asks for now, for benefit of the anonymous shut-in pays her so generously. So her requesting a supply of tablets as an alternative to the fucking needle is something that shouldn’t bring any scrutiny, right.”

A muscle in Tommy’s jaw jumped. 

“Figure you come back today for a reason, mate. Maybe come here in the first place for a reason, too. It’s fucking beyond me what that reason could be, but the fact you didn’t head to your people when you got free of Bedlam and you haven’t asked us to contact them for you neither must have something to do with it, yeah? But if there’s somewhere else you want to go, I’ll make sure you get there. With enough of them tablets to wean yourself off the fucking shit on your own.” 

Wasn’t expecting an answer by now, was he, so he weren’t disappointed when none came. But Tommy put the knife down again and wrapped his arms around his knees, so it was something.

The gulls took over the chatter for a bit, screaming back and forth over their heads before landing a yard from their shoes, beady black eyes tilted accusingly in their direction.

“Got nothing on me today, mates,” Alfie called, shooing them off when one got cheeky enough to come right up to his elbow as if heading for his pocket. “Should’ve brought my pistol out with me, right, these buggers never take no for an answer.”

There it was, the slightest indentation in the corner of Tommy’s mouth, the closest he’d come to showing anything like humor. 

“Hmm,” Alfie said. “Yeah. Fucking rats with wings, these things. Not proper birds at all. So. You coming inside?”

“No.”

“Right, hmm. Give me a hand up, then?”

Something spread over Tommy’s face too quickly to catch, then he shook his head.

“Okay, yeah, alright.” It took Alfie a good awkward minute to lever himself upright, and he had to use Tommy’s shoulder as a prop to do it. Tommy just sat there and let him without comment, of course, but didn’t move away from the touch neither. “Well, door’ll be open if you change your mind.”

When he looked back from the gate, Tommy was still sitting there, contemplating the waves.

Alfie didn’t know what he’d expected. Well, that wasn’t right, was it, when he’d seen Tommy on the beach, returned from wherever he’d spent his afternoon, he’d thought at the very least the day would end with him inside the fucking house again. Why else come back? But two hours after Alfie’d left him on the sand he was still out there. Marie’d been giving Alfie looks since he’d come in, finding excuses to tidy the sitting room so she could check out the balcony doors every so often, letting out the occasional displeased huff. He’d done his best to ignore her, busying himself with his book. Weren’t as if Marie couldn’t speak her mind. But eventually it got to him.

“What, Marie?” She’d just been switching on the lamps when the last sigh escaped her. “Fucking what?”

“Sun’s going down,” she said.

“It does that, yeah, once a day, almost as if it’s on a schedule.” 

“So you’re just going to leave things as they are?”

“Thought maybe I’d have myself a bath later,” he said, refusing to look up from his book.

“With Mr. Shelby, I meant.”

“Knew what you fucking meant, Marie.” Alfie lowered the book, giving in. “Mr. Shelby does what he wants, right, and if he wants to sit out there taking in Margate’s natural air, well, who am I to--”

Marie was standing over him, mouth pressed in an impatient line. “When you came in you complained he wouldn’t help you up from the sand.”

“Yeah, well, I was just whinging, Marie, that’s--”

“Don’t suppose you asked him if he needed a hand himself?”

“A hand with what?” He was genuinely perplexed by now. “Marie, if you could come to your point, instead of taking the long way round--”

“It’s three days he’s been here,” Marie said. “Hasn’t eaten a thing, has he.”

With that she seemed to have made up her mind that he was a lost cause, because she turned and left, stripping off her apron as she went. A moment later she reappeared in the hall in her overcoat.

He managed to get himself up off the couch, just starting to follow her meaning. “Marie, let me--”

But she’d softened a bit. “Go sit back down, Mr. Solomons. He’ll likely take it better coming from me anyhow.”

Well. “He’s got that knife on him,” he warned.

“And how did that happen?” she retorted, but then she was out the door.

Fucking hell. Alfie crossed to the balcony doors and watched as Marie approached Tommy from a wide angle, giving him plenty of warning of her presence. She bent over him a little, a hand on one of his shoulders, and Tommy’s head cocked up towards her, seeming to listen to whatever she was saying. After a moment he shook his head, and then Marie had a grip under his arm and somehow between them they got him vertical. He wasn’t steady on his feet but he didn’t go down again, and Marie wedged herself under his shoulder and led him stumbling back towards the house.

“We’ll just rest a moment in the kitchen, how about that, Mr. Shelby.” Marie was saying, a little bit breathless, as Alfie held the door for them. “Then I’ll get you something warm to drink.”

He was shivering, Tommy, not obvious-like but it was there if you looked. It’d been warm enough to Alfie in his overcoat, but he’d only been out there a short time and that had been when the sun was still overhead; now twilight was closing in, dragging everything towards dark and the return of the winter chill. Tommy’s eyes flicked to Alfie as they passed him, but he didn’t shrug free of Marie’s support, just let her take him into the kitchen where the chicken roasting in the oven made it the warmest room in the place. She got him into one of the chairs and he slipped his cap off automatically, his face gone the color of dough. 

“Take a seat yourself, Marie,” Alfie said. “I can make a pot of tea.”

Marie didn’t argue, just took the chair across the little table from Tommy. “Fix Mr. Shelby’s with cream and sugar.”

To his astonishment, Tommy didn’t object. To his further astonishment, when Marie told him to strip off his jacket and let her take a look at his arm, he just obeyed. She reached across the table and took hold of his left forearm with its stained cuff. Blood had soaked into the fabric of his sleeve in a wide splotch halfway to his elbow, drying in runnels down to his wrist. Marie peeled the cloth back carefully and Tommy winced as she pulled it away from where it had stuck to the wound -- a straight gash across the meat of his inner arm. Ugly, but didn’t look deep enough for stitches, oozing a little fresh blood but already half scabbed over.

“Why don’t you get me a flannel and some iodine, Mr. Solomons,” Marie said, “while you wait for the kettle to boil.”

Alfie did as he was told and kept his questions to himself. Given the placement, given a right handed man armed with a sharp blade, there weren’t much mystery to how the cut might have got there. The only question was the purpose, yeah, and that was a question that could wait, if it was asked at all.

The merry whistle of the kettle met him at the door by time he returned with his pile of supplies. Marie was out of her chair and filling the teapot with leaves, but when she saw him she relieved him of his burden and left the rest of the tea preparation to him, turning back to her patient. Tommy watched them bustle around him with a stunned look to him, as if he’d woken inside a gingerbread house. Alfie knew the feeling. When Marie got it in her mind to dote, there was no stopping her.

“Here you are,” Marie said, slipping a tea towel under his arm where it still sat on the tabletop. “Don’t bleed on the table, love.” 

While Alfie pulled down three sets of cups and saucers and found the sugar bowl and the creamer, Marie cleaned the wound and wrapped a length of bandage around it. By the time the tea was brewed she was done. Alfie handed round the teacups and saucers -- plain for Marie and himself, for Tommy a heap of sugar and enough cream to turn the tea a pale tawny, because he’d caught on to her intention by then of course. Tommy’s nose wrinkled a little at the sweetness but he drank it anyhow, and in time a bit of color rose back into his face. After she’d finished her own tea Marie got up and started fussing around the kitchen finishing dinner, so Alfie settled in her chair for as long as his sciatica would allow. 

Marie was halfway through trimming a pile of carrots before he realized the fucking paring knife was secure in her busy hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for implied self harm that happened off-screen.
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone who has commented, the encouragement really helps when writing such a long fic. 
> 
> Posting might be more like once a week after this so I don't catch up too quickly to where I'm still writing.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> see end notes for warnings specific to this chapter.

That night Alfie learnt Tommy Shelby could in fact still speak aloud in full fucking sentances, however the ability was apparently now limited to communication with the dead.

He’d lasted about as long as he ever did on the hard kitchen chair, which was to say he’d had to move back to his trusty couch by the time Marie was pulling the chicken out of the oven. Tommy seemed content to stay in the kitchen even after Marie brought Alfie a tray out with his dinner, so Alfie ate alone, half an ear trained on the muffled chatter as Marie took her own meal at the table and convinced Tommy to try a mug of the beef tea he’d rejected that first night. Eventually her tone took a turn to the serious. The only bit he caught made it clear she was talking about the events of the previous evening. He considered making sure all was well, but thought better of it when he heard Tommy’s eventual one-syllable replies.

He waited until the voices had faded to rise with his tray of empty dishes. When Alfie joined them again in the kitchen, Marie was busy at the counter stripping the chicken’s carcass of its meat and Tommy sat watching her work, his chair pushed out a little from the table, his gaze gone heavy-lidded.

“Oh, Mr. Solomons, I’ve a job for you,” Marie said, taking his tray from him and emptying his dishes into the sink. “You’ve some spare shirts and trousers and things I’m sure you wouldn’t mind Mr. Shelby borrowing until we can get him some of his own.”

Alfie blinked at her. Just last night she’d come near to accusing him of harboring their murderer, and now she was speaking as if she’d taken him on as her ward. Tommy’d straightened a bit in his chair, giving Alfie a wary eye. His shirt was definitely worse for wear, yellowed around the collar and cuffs, and that was before he’d got blood all over it. The most mundane fucking misery during the war had been wearing the same filthy clothes for days on end, hadn’t it. That and the fucking lice.

“Yeah, you know, ‘course I do,” he managed.

“Good. Put them in the guest room, will you? Mr. Shelby’s going to have a bath.”

Alfie wasn’t sure what to make of the look on the other man’s face, but he found himself turning to obey without any of his usual reflexive commentary. Last thing he heard about the matter as he fled safely back to the sitting room was Marie chiding Tommy not to get his bandage wet. He didn’t emerge again for a good hour, at which time Marie fussed a bit more over the cut on his arm and then brought him a mug of hot milk, the consumption of which didn’t appear to be optional.

“We’ll just work our way up to something solid, won’t we,” she said, settling him in his armchair. He accepted the attention with a faintly perplexed amusement, but underneath lay something blackened and raw around the edges, like a gangrenous wound. With a final pat on his shoulder, Marie took herself back to the kitchen.

Definitely odd, right, to see another man in his clothing, especially this one, what with his usual bespoke suits. Same loose white shirt rolled at the elbows, same black trousers Alfie saw in the mirror every day, but taken on a new sort of shape altogether, suddenly alien. Tommy must have noticed him looking because he shifted a bit in his chair and found something across the room to absorb his attention.

Alfie’d put on the radio while he’d been in the bath and it was playing some sort of orchestra piece, violins and such. Tommy cocked his head, listening, absently picking at the edge of the white bandage on his arm, gone fogged over in a way he hadn’t been since last night.

“Is an appreciation for this racket required of a man once he moves himself into a fucking country manor, mate, or does that come with the office in Westminster?”

Tommy blinked, taking his sweet time on the return journey from wherever he’d got off to. “No,” he said, a bit flat, a challenge in the lift of his chin.

“Hmm. Myself, I like the piano jingles.” That almost, almost, bought him a smile, didn’t it, there was a distinct increase in the angle of one corner of Tommy’s mouth. “Never paid much mind to music before this, no time for it. Takes all your attention to really grasp, music. Can’t be thinking about who you’re taking out next and who’s looking to have your fucking head on a platter, yeah, not if you want to hear the notes as they’re played. Can’t truly _listen_ while you got one ear out for the cocking of a gun. Took awhile, you know, to get used to it, to stop waiting for that footstep coming from behind.”

He knew about the fucking footsteps, Tommy. Yeah. Any man willing to smuggle opium knew about that. Didn’t say nothing, though, just sipped his hot milk, attention steady on Alfie from across the room. Waiting for him to go on, maybe, because once Alfie got into a mood it was obvious to anyone who’d known him for any time at all that he’d follow wherever it took him and carry you with him whether you was looking forward to the trip or not.

“Never really leaves you, does it. But there do come times where you forget, yeah, and you can hear something, hear the _song_, and that’s it, right, that’s the only thing. Just for that moment. It’s like the feeling when it all comes together, innit, when all the intelligence you’ve gathered and all the things you know and all the things you don’t know come clear and show you the way, the next step and the next fifty steps, and if anybody asks you to explain what it is you see, you can’t, can you, can’t put it into words at all, because it’s like this violin we’re listening to, Thomas, it’s the instant of creation. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

The grandfather clock chimed eight. His audience of one had propped his head on his hand, but he was listening, gaze more keen than it’d been in three days. Something of his usual self there, something that Alfie hadn’t quite realized was missing.

“All that noise, right, all that sheer _information_ coming at you -- the path a shell will take, the quickest route through a tangle of razorwire, the way a crowd of men scatter like fucking pigeons at machine gun fire -- something happens to your mind. To survive to the next second you start making calculations out of all that noise, start seeing the patterns. It’s what God does, make something out of nothing, make order out of chaos. Can’t teach it in any of them universities, it’s formed from the pressure of hell, innit, like a diamond from coal. It’s a kind of art. Nothing can be hung in a gallery, right, or played over the radio, but we artists of chaos recognize each other’s work, don’t we.”

A melancholy curve overtook Tommy’s mouth. “Yeah.”

“Hmm, yeah. And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. Some men turned all that noise into poetry, you know, or music. Or that skinny painter I saw in Vienna, he’d been in the war. But some of us turned it into something else altogether. No proper name for our art, is there, and the only acknowledgement we’ll ever get for it is the gallows.”

Tommy considered this for a moment and then reached for the notebook Alfie’d left by his chair earlier in the day. The slip of paper he passed over was written in a steadier hand than before, closer to what Alfie’d been used to from years of contracts and correspondence.

> To think our former state a happy dream
> 
> from which awaked the truth of what we are

Alfie frowned, some hazy sense of familiarity plucked by the words. “What is this, mate? The quote, I mean. Not Virgil or Dante, yeah, but I know it.”

Tommy handed him another slip. This was a fucking inefficient means of conversation, right, requiring one or the other of them to haul themselves up from their chairs in turn.

> Richard II
> 
> there’s other uses for the art
> 
> other outlets for what was made of us

Shakespeare, then. Should’ve known Tommy’d pick the one about the deposed king to know by heart, over any of the more popular works. Got no time for the fucking comedies, Tommy Shelby, ‘course not. “Politics, you mean?”

Tommy gave him a nod, settling back in his chair. At some point Marie must have got him a fresh pack of cigarettes from the crate, which he broke open, tapping one out.

“Yeah, hmm, politics.” And here they were. Back to No Man’s Land, the ground sown with landmines, right, which Alfie’d taken care to avoid the past two days, despite the inventory of questions he’d accumulated. “And how’d that go for you, politics?”

He’d asked this the last time Tommy’d made a visit. Even though he’d only been in Parliament for a couple of years his answer had carried an undercurrent of boredom; but that’d been before, hadn’t it. Before… whatever had brought him here this time. Before Bedlam.

> the truth of what we are doesn’t change. They
> 
> just find convenient use for it. a boat we can’t get off of
> 
> Won’t ever let us off. Safe behind the lines
> 
> while we plant the charges for them. Win their wars
> 
> for them. a bayonet they point at whomever they please.

Alfie stared at him over his spectacles. That was… hmm. There weren’t no dancing around this anymore, was there. “You was pointed at the Russians by the Economic League, I gathered that much, yeah. But who aimed you at Mosley, Tom? He seems just their type.”

Tommy went very still, the smoke from his forgotten cigarette wreathing his head.

“Alright,” Alfie said quietly, when it seemed nothing more would be forthcoming. The radio had moved on to the weather report, but the second news would be starting at any moment, so Alfie pushed himself up and switched the thing off before it could. When he got back to his seat, Tommy had stubbed out his cigarette and was bent over his notebook again, rubbing at his mouth with one hand. It took him awhile this time and when he shoved the roughly torn piece of paper Alfie’s way, his letters had lost much of their neat form.

> we hear this fearful tempest sing yet see
> 
> no shelter to avoid the storm
> 
> The King
> 
> was at his fucking wedding. It’s always
> 
> them. The ones who made us most don’t mind
> 
> the consequences the dire aspect &those
> 
> those that do are content to pass the burden

Fucking hell. While Alfie tried to make some sense of this new dispatch Tommy had heaved himself from his chair and taken up position at the balcony doors once more, his hands linked at the back of his head like a man about to duck an incoming shell.

“Tommy.” Alfie kept his voice unruffled as he could make it. Tommy sank to his haunches, silently curling in on himself, his back to the room. Fuck. He shouldn’t have--

“Yeah.” More a gulp for air than a word, really. But it was something.

“You alright?”

Alfie could hear him smothering convulsive gasps from across the room. “...no.”

“Okay,” Alfie said. “Right. I see that, mate. We’ll just move the topic of conversation onto something else for awhile, yeah?”

Tommy didn’t say nothing more, but after a bit he pulled himself out of his crouch and stood by the doors again, one of his hands scubbing up and down the stubble at the nape of his neck while he got his breathing back under control. When it seemed he was going to stay there for the time being, Alfie got up and crossed to the gramophone. Found something on the sedate side and put it on, a light tinkling piano tune.

“Come sit down, Thomas,” he said finally, “and listen to this song with me.”

To his surprise, Tommy did.

Marie’d made up a tall tale about his insomnia to justify a supply of tablets for Tommy, but the excuse turned out to have been a fucking curse, didn’t it, because come two o’clock in the fucking morning Alfie was still wide awake. She’d shooed them both off to bed around half ten, Marie, and continuing the confounding pattern since his return that afternoon, as if used to being ordered around like a child, Tommy had gone easily enough. Alfie had rebelled just to do it, just for a sense of normalcy, reading his book for another half hour after Marie herself had turned in, but in the end he’d had to admit to himself that he was dog tired.

And he was, he’d reached the tired beyond tired, but he laid in his bed for what felt like fucking days and nothing at all happened. Too weary to sleep or too much on his mind still, turning over what Ollie’d told him and Tommy’s fragmented scribbles and everything he still didn’t know between the two. Finally, willing to give the chamomile a try, he pulled on his robe and house shoes and started for the kitchen, avoiding the creaky floorboard in the hall outside the guest room.

Turned out it was a wasted effort because as he passed by there came the unexpected sound of muffled voices behind the door. Or one muffled voice, anyhow. Alfie stopped, reaching for a gun in the holster he hadn’t worn in years. He backed up a few steps until he was closer to the door. Who the fuck could have--

“Fucking hell.” The voice was Tommy’s. Definitely and unmistakably Tommy Shelby, hoarse and world-weary. “Arthur was right, you know. Our weddings really are bloody terrible. Ada went into labour with Karl at me brother John’s fucking wedding.” There was a long pause, as if someone else was speaking. And then: “Fuck good intentions, I thought you knew. About the baby. I should never have--”

He broke off, as if interrupted. Who the fuck was he talking to? Alfie strained to hear, listening for any sound at all, but when there was no answering voice he rapped on the door.

“Tommy?” Nothing. “If you don’t fucking answer, I’m going to--”

The door swung inward. Tommy stared out at him, wide eyed and ashen in the weak light from the lamp on his bedside table. Alfie couldn’t see nobody in the room past his shoulder. It weren’t impossible someone had been there, hiding in the closet or the bathroom maybe, but it seemed unlikely, didn’t it.

“You got a girl from town in there with you, Tom?”

Tommy frowned, thrown, as if Alfie’d asked whether he was harbouring a flock of ostriches in his room. “No.”

“Right, okay, well I heard you speaking to somebody, mate, actually fucking speaking, with multiple words all strung in a row like pearls, so--”

The door shut in his face.

Well, fuck. There really was only one explanation for any of this, weren’t there.

He spoke to the door, rather than trying to force it yet. “Yeah, alright, but Marie said I was to wake her if you started seeing things, cos it’s a sign the withdrawal’s gotten bad again and nobody’s looking to do last night over, are they.” Silence. “Tell me you was just talking to yourself and nobody dead was in there with you and I’ll let it be, right. Marie weren’t sure how long you could go without another dose of that shit but she told me she explained all this to you, yeah, and--”

The door opened again. Tommy pushed past him, down the hallway and out of sight. Weren’t nothing Alfie could do but follow, hoping he wasn’t headed outside again. Turned out he’d gone for the notebook, as if he hadn’t just been speaking in full fucking sentences five minutes before. Alfie switched on a lamp and dropped into one of the armchairs, scrubbing at his face, waiting until Tommy held out a piece of paper for him to read.

“Hmm,” he said, after glancing at it. “Can’t make out a word of this, mate, not without--”

Tommy shuffled through the clutter on the table next to the couch and came up with his spectacles.

> Not withdrawal yet. No fever.

Alfie sighed. Arguing with a man at two o’clock in the fucking morning about the things he’d been talking to that wasn’t there was not something he was ever going to be prepared to do, was he, especially not when half the conversation might as well have been by telegram. He should get Marie for this, there weren’t--

Another slip of paper was shoved into his view. Obviously Tommy’d read the disbelief on his face.

> Before. Fucking before. Awhile now theyve come.

“Before,” Alfie said slowly. “You mean you was… you was seeing things before Bedlam? Before they started drugging you?”

“Yeah,” Tommy bit off, chin lifting defensively.

Well. That was something for a man like him to admit, wasn’t it. Might be lying to avoid the needle again, but that didn’t seem right. Nah, this had the ring of truth.

“This what landed you in Bedlam, then?” Tommy didn’t react at first, like he hadn’t heard the question. “Tommy?”

“No,” he said finally. Whether it was an answer or a refusal of the query, Alfie couldn’t tell.

“So let me get this straight, you can’t talk to me or Marie but you’re able, you know, to address whatever dead thing you’ve been seeing?”

_They_, he’d written. So there was more than one.

Tommy gave him a wary nod. Didn’t put pen to page, so either he had no interest in elaborating further, or couldn’t. He was picking at the bandage again, which reminded Alfie of one of the other many unanswered questions on his list.

“Right. Hmm. That cut you came back with this afternoon. You did it yourself, yeah?”

Tommy just stared at him. When Alfie didn’t press him further on the matter, he took to the notebook.

> had to check

That… hm. “Check what, mate?” An expression Alfie couldn’t decipher had come over him, like a man asked to solve a riddle while he lay in a shell hole holding his own guts in his hands. “You find out what you needed to, then?”

“Yes,” Tommy said.

“You care to tell me what it was you had to check by slicing your own fucking arm open with Marie’s favorite paring knife?”

That got him nothing more than that look again, edged this time with something decidedly bleak. The slip of paper he handed Alfie didn’t clear anything up.

> It bled

Fuck. “Yeah. That’s what happens when you fucking--”

Tommy turned and walked away. A moment later Alfie heard the door to the guest room shut with a solid click.

Chamomile, right, that had been his intention before all of this. While he waited for the kettle, Alfie opened the cutlery drawer and counted the knives. Nothing missing. Not that it meant much, given a man of Tommy Shelby’s capacities.

A man of Tommy’s capacities knew where and how to cut himself if he’d meant it to do any real damage. So his explanation, while not in the slightest bit comprehensible, had apparently been an honest one, hadn’t it.

Fuck but he was tired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> discussion of past, offscreen self harm.
> 
> Thanks again to everyone who has commented, I really appreciate it and it's writer fuel.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really sorry to do this, but due to recent events regarding 3rd party apps which seek to profit off work posted on AO3 without consent of the authors, this fic will be locked after this chapter and you'll need a (free) AO3 account and be logged in to read the next one.
> 
> I have 5 invitations for AO3 accounts! If you need one hit me up in the comments and we'll figure it out.
> 
> **NOTE: I will be locking this fic on March 2nd. After that you won't be able to read it without being logged in to an AO3 account.**

Despite having got a few solid hours of shut-eye, Alfie woke up the next morning more beat than he’d been when he turned in, couldn’t-get-out-of-bed tired. It happened now and again, though it had been awhile; between the lack of sleep and unexpected stress of the past few days he should have seen it coming. Even had an old-fashioned contraption set up that rang a bell for Marie when he pulled a string, which he made use of even when it made him feel a right fool, a fucking pampered toff who couldn’t do nothing for himself. Well, he were rich enough, he supposed, and there was times when he was forced to admit he needed it, the ability to call Marie from afar. Had a silly little hand bell out in the sitting room for the same reason, but usually when he was out there he just shouted.

So he spent his day in bed, reading mostly, but sometimes he’d slip into sleep. Dreamt of a black horse rearing up and throwing its unseen rider, startled by shadows in the shape of a black cat. As far as dreams went that one was fucking obvious, wasn’t it, but it left him restless, so after a late lunch he had Marie bring him his cane and he tottered out to wrap himself in a blanket on his couch with the balcony doors open for a little fresh air. Found himself on his own, though. Tommy’s tablets had come and after Marie’d dosed him up he’d retreated to the guest room, where she said he’d been sleeping most of the day himself. If Alfie took five minutes to give it some thought, the whole thing was ridiculous -- two of Britain’s most notorious scoundrels holed up in the same beachside apartments, sleeping away a Monday like old men. Laughable, yeah.

Tommy roused in time for dinner and Marie brought them both bowls of chicken soup, which they ate in companionable silence, Alfie still weary enough for nothing much to be crossing his mind worth saying, and Tommy, well. Tommy was moving with a dull lethargy that might still have been the drug, his attention blunted unless you called his name and waited for him to catch up.

They were both back in bed by nine.

The next day went better. Alfie was able to rise first thing, for one, though the fatigue lingered and kept him mostly bound to the couch. After a consultation requiring a flurry of passed notes, Marie ventured out and returned with shopping bags from the men’s department at Bobby’s. Though far from his usual tailored uniform it was a relief to see Tommy in something that hadn’t belonged to Alfie first. She’d even got him an overcoat.

While Marie was fussing over Tommy, separating out anything that didn’t fit right, Alfie retreated to his office and shut the door. It’d been two days since he’d heard anything from Ollie and though that was probably a reasonable amount of time for the intelligence-gathering he’d been tasked with, Alfie gave the girl his number anyhow. He’d got bored enough waiting that he’d started doodling casks and barrels on an old invoice before the girl come back on the line apologetically to tell him nobody was answering at the number he’d given.

“Yeah, alright, thank you,” he told her, deciding he was not at all concerned just yet. “Nice day out, innit, he’s probably enjoying the sun.”

By the time he had almost convinced himself that were true and left the office, Marie was back in the kitchen kneading a lump of dough and Tommy’s door was shut.

“Wouldn’t think he’d tolerate all this napping.”

“Usually I’d give him the full dose at bedtime. Doesn’t want it at night though, so we’re experimenting with the schedule a bit. See if we can spread it out in a way that won’t leave him quite so dazed as he was yesterday.” Marie patted the dough and dropped it into a bowl, covering it with a towel to rise. “Once he’s tapered down enough it shouldn’t knock him out like this.”

He’d carefully avoided inserting himself into any of the conversations between Marie and Tommy having to do with the tablets, so he just gave her a hum of acknowledgement and didn’t comment.

“My guess, though, this is mostly exhaustion catching up with him, now he’s somewhere he can rest.”

And that was something he knew all too well, didn’t he.

That night, when he heard murmurs from the guest bedroom again -- a whole conversation’s worth of fucking murmurs -- he didn’t interfere.

So they settled into something of a routine, he and Tommy and Marie. By the end of the week Tommy’s nap had shrunk to a couple hours after lunch and he was sharper, more present, than he’d been before. Started initiating conversations with him or Marie, peppering them with questions about Margate, mostly. Past history, local politics, things neither of them knew a great deal about in any depth being transplants and Alfie more or less a recluse since his arrival, what with being shot in the face and all. When he didn’t have the answer to one of these inquiries Alfie just made shit up on the spot, and so it became something of a game, Tommy catching him at it. Entertaining enough to fill the time. Got him a short bark of a laugh even, once, when he’d come up with a particularly ridiculous history of the mysterious Shell Grotto involving a pirate, a Margatian mermaid, and a flock of persistently amourous seagulls.

They kept to topics that had nothing to do with Birmingham or London or Oswald Mosley and quickly used up all the paper in Tommy’s notebook, so Marie got him a couple pocket-sized pads he could carry around easier. Couldn’t always grasp everything he tried to communicate in his odd, compressed notes, Alfie and Marie, but it never got as fragmented as it had been that first day and if Tommy occasionally walked away from them in frustration he’d eventually return and have another go at being understood.

Alfie tried Ollie again, and again got no reply, and if that worried him more than a little, he kept it to himself.

After dinner they’d settle in the sitting room and take in whatever musical programming was on the radio, Alfie always careful to shut the thing off before the news started. And if Tommy continued his habit of talking to ghosts in the nocturnal hours, well, Alfie let that go unremarked on as well, even if he occasionally indulged the inescapable temptation to listen in. Wednesday, whoever it was, Tommy hadn’t spoken in English and it hadn’t gone on longer than a few short exchanges. Thursday there was nothing Alfie had heard, or nothing while he’d been awake anyhow. Friday though, Friday brought some bloke named Barney, the first one Tommy’d called by name.

“Suppose I deserved it, for what I did. I thought anything would be better than that hole you were in,” he said. “Still don’t think I was wrong about that.”

It was just after midnight and Alfie could hear him clear as a bell through the bedroom wall, so he must have been on the other side of it, voice amplified by the tile in the guest bathroom. Seemed an odd place for a chat with the dead.

“Didn’t think I was wrong but you wanted to live, and I--” There was silence, and when the voice returned Alfie had to strain to catch it, the words jumbled and running together, nothing like Tommy’s usual measured speech. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Too many lights in me eyes, all’s I saw was the blood on the glass. I don’t know who did it. Judas, must’ve been Judas, eh? Black cat dream means Judas. The only ones knew you were up there were Arthur and the Lees. And Johnny.”

Then his voice shifted and went choppy, as if he was pacing the small space. “It-- it’s all noise. Too much fucking noise. All those fucking people, all those faces, it doesn’t make sense. No one knew but us. You, me, Arthur. Jeremiah, Johnny, Aberama. Charlie and Curly. No one but us. John’s dead, so he didn’t know, and even if he had he wouldn’t have betrayed us. No one could have known. It doesn’t--”

There was a dull thud against the wall, enough force to rattle the pleasant framed print of a bunch of daisies Marie’d thought he’d enjoy staring at with his one eye, back when he’d been trapped in his bed. Alfie jumped as if he’d been caught out.

“I’m sorry,” Tommy said finally, and there weren’t anything more after that.

Lying in his bed with the fruits of his eavesdropping playing over in his head, picking through what he’d been able to make sense of, Alfie recalled a headline buried in the London papers months ago, back when he’d been scouring the news for any information on what had fucking happened. An escapee from an asylum in Birmingham, name of Barney Thomason. Found shot in the head in the theatre where Mosley’d held his fucking rally. Two men had died that night, but since neither of them had been Peakies far as Alfie’d known, he hadn’t put much stock in any connection to Tommy’s plot. There’d been a riot, things had gotten out of hand, the coppers had moved in, it happened. Hadn’t been any of his men so he hadn’t given it any further thought. The second corpse hadn’t been identified, but if Ollie ever answered his fucking phone Alfie figured it might be worth a try, finding out who that second dead man had been, since Tommy was now chatting to the first one.

If Ollie didn’t call, well. That was a problem best solved after a decent night’s sleep, wasn’t it.

Saturday morning he’d just settled in his usual spot to enjoy his first cup of tea of the day when Tommy’d swept into the room already in his new overcoat and handed him a slip of paper.

> Get up. Let’s go.

Brows raised, Alfie folded the note and took another sip of tea, ignoring Tommy’s impatient glare.

“Go where, mate?”

Tommy just gestured towards the door as if that was self-evident. He supposed it was; for the last few days around this time Tommy’d taken to venturing out to walk along the beach. The first time he’d done it Alfie had nursed a reflexive doubt he’d see him again, but he’d only been gone an hour and change before returning, pinked around the edges from the breeze. After that he’d made a habit of it, this early morning trek. Sometimes he’d be off for a couple hours, sometimes a bit less, but he always came back, so Alfie eventually let himself relax about it.

“Nah.” Alfie set his cup down, but before he could come up with any kind of rational reason to stay in the warm familiar bosom of the indoors, there came another missive from the pocket notebook.

> Fresh air. Be good for you.

Tommy was waiting with his hands on his hips, like Alfie was one of his men he expected to jump to attention.

“Good for me. Fuck. What, you think you can just give me an order and I’ll--”

“Yeah.” It came with a wry twist of his mouth that was hard not to answer with one of his own.

“I’m warning you now, odds are you’ll be carrying me back, mate, so as long as you’re prepared--”

But Tommy was already rummaging around in the hall closet, pulling out Alfie’s own coat and his cane. Right. He supposed it wouldn’t do any harm to indulge whatever whim this was.

“Bloody hell, Tom, wait for me to find my fucking hat, yeah?”

He wasn’t going to last nearly as long as Tommy’s usual morning constitutional. Keeping his balance in the sand was a challenge even with his cane, even on the hard packed edge of the shore, but Tommy seemed content enough to let Alfie set the pace, hands in his pockets, face smoothed of its usual lines. Every so often he’d pause and dig something out of the sand, some artifact offered up by the sea, more often than not tossing it right back into the waves to be carried off again. If his efforts gained him the right kind of stone, worn flat by time and incessant friction, he’d stop long enough to throw it just so, a quick flick of his wrist that sent the thing skipping over the surface of the water before a breaking wave gobbled it down.

Alfie supposed it was pleasant. He supposed Tommy was right that it was curative in some fashion, getting out of that fucking sitting room, taking in the sun and the crisp sea air. But not long after they’d left a hand on his arm stopped him, and he glanced up to find Tommy frowning at him.

“What,” he managed. He hadn’t realized until they halted that he was panting with effort, that his attention for the last bit of time had been locked on placing one foot in front of the other.

Tommy just tugged at Alfie’s sleeve then turned around and started back for the house.

A surge of anger rushed through him. He wanted to argue, to insist they keep going, but in the end he knew it was just his fucking pride talking, wasn’t it. He’d threatened that Tommy’d have to carry him back; seems Tommy was looking to avoid that fate, and fucking hell, fair enough. By the time they were climbing the two steps up to the door back at the house, Alfie’s legs were jelly and he was leaning on his cane like it was an extra limb. So when Tommy come to a stop just inside the hall, Alfie wasn’t in much condition to notice the reason, breathless as he was.

“Fuck me,” he gasped, nearly colliding with Tommy’s back before he was able to halt his staggering forward progress. “If you was looking to murder me, mate, there are easier ways than dragging me out to wade through that fucking sand.”

But Tommy’d turned rigid as a plank of wood. There was a startled noise beyond him in the sitting room, a feminine sort of noise.

“Marie,” Alfie called. “This man wants me dead, right. Thought you should know who to hold responsible for my imminent demise.”

It weren’t Marie after all. Which he saw, yeah, once he’d managed to maneuver himself enough to see round the solid obstacle that was Tommy Shelby. Instead it was a pretty thing, smartly dressed, face narrowed with strain under the brim of her hat. Still wrapped in a fine wool coat with a wide fur collar, like maybe she’d just arrived. She’d been perched on the couch but as Alfie watched she bolted to her feet, gloved hands flying to her mouth to stifle a cry.

Tommy backed into him, nearly knocking him to the floor.

“Ada--” The name cut through the silence like the crack of bone. It was Tommy, of course, but the surprise of it almost sent Alfie looking round the room for some other man.

The woman dropped her hands, then clasped them together, gone pale. “Jesus. We thought you’d… we were afraid you were dead.”

Fuck. Fuck. This was a Shelby, wasn’t it. One Alfie had never laid eyes on himself, but given her age it must be the sister. Ada, Tommy’d said. Yeah, Ada Thorne, he remembered suddenly, the information dropping out of some file in his head, the one marked _Tommy Shelby’s Fucking Kin -- Approach With Extreme Caution_. Somebody had fucked up, hadn’t they. Probably that somebody was him, for thinking he could stay good and anonymous and dead indefinitely while harboring the head of the Peaky fucking Blinders in his guest bedroom.

With her usual perfect timing, Marie chose that moment to join them, a tray of tea that must have been meant for their visitor balanced in her hands.

“Oh, you’re already back. Mr. Solomons, this is--”

“Yeah,” Alfie said, finally pushing the rest of the way past Tommy and into the sitting room. “We’ve just met.”

Everybody fucking stood there like they was in some kind of standoff, a standoff lacking in all obvious weaponry save the verbal, but the immediate needs of his body weren’t going to let him play that game for long so Alfie limped to Tommy’s usual armchair and lowered himself down with a groan, tossing his hat onto the table. Ada Thorne sank to the couch again, her eyes locked on her brother as she stripped off her gloves then held them clutched in one hand. Marie shot Aflie a flustered sort of glare and fussed over the girl, pouring her a cup of tea before giving Tommy a worried once-over and retreating back to safer territory, namely the kitchen. As for Tommy, he stayed rooted where he was in the doorway, his hands folded into fists. Alfie wondered idly if he was carrying the paring knife -- he had the look of a man cornered in an alley, ready to lash out with anything he had on hand to get free.

“So.” Alfie leaned forward. “Ada Thorne. What brings you to Margate?” If she was surprised he knew who she was, she didn’t show it. Just tore her attention from Tommy to grace him with a withering frown. “Yeah, alright, silly question, innit.”

Tommy broke his paralysis, stalked past them without as much as a glance, and took up his usual spot by the balcony doors. Putting Alfie between himself and his sister, he couldn’t help but notice. The cigarette, when he lit it, only shook a little. Alfie kept him in the corner of his eye while he watched the woman.

“Tommy.” She set aside her teacup. “Have you… have you been here this whole time? Uncle Charlie’s beside himself, he--”

Tommy yanked the balcony doors open and stepped through, white plume of smoke swirling in his wake.

Alfie took pity on her when Tommy didn’t give any sign he’d be coming inside any time soon. “That’s Charlie Strong, I take it?”

“What the fuck do you know about it?” She’d gone suspicious on him. Not that he blamed her, right, she had to have some idea who he was, being a Shelby and all.

“About as much as you do, is my guess. Strong broke him out of Bedlam, yeah? Then what, lost him again?”

“If you know that much, Tommy must have told you the rest, so why don’t you fill me in?”

“Not telling much of anything to anybody, Tommy.” He knew Tommy was listening by the way the line of his shoulders had gone stiff, from the angle of the back of his head, but if he wanted to make his opinion of the matter known he had ways, didn’t he.

“Why didn’t you… we were all so worried, Tom.” She had to speak to his back, because he weren’t making a move to acknowledge she was even there, but Alfie had to hand it to the lass, she pushed on. “Why didn’t you come home? Jesus Christ. What’ve you been doing, here with this--“

“Dead man,” Alfie couldn’t help but interject.

It stopped her in her tracks, which he hadn’t expected. “What did you say?”

Alfie took a breath, ready to expound on his favorite subject -- whether Margate was Hell, Purgatory or some sort of afterlife -- but her look wasn’t the one people got when his flights of fancy threw them into puzzlement. It was more disturbed, as if she was considering the idea she was sharing the room with a madman. So he changed direction and took a stab at the matter at hand.

“Tommy was declared dead at Bedlam, right, so him joining me here is appropriate in a poetic sort of way, if you take my meaning, as we are both officially residents of the grave, especially since he’s the one put me there. Though I suppose legally speaking in his case it’s poor Mr. Jones who’s passed on, and for the second time, right, which must have mystified the paper-shufflers in London.”

If she was impressed with what he knew, she didn’t let on. “I take it that’s where your man’s trail ran cold, then.”

“Fuck,” Alfie scrubbed at his eyes. No wonder he hadn’t been able to ring Ollie. “He still alive?”

“You have me to thank for that, by the way.” This, the most legitimate of the Shelbys, had a spine of steel, didn’t she. “Arthur wanted his head on a pike.”

“How’d you catch him?”

“Tommy’s doctor called me a week ago when someone started asking questions. At first we thought it might be a reporter, but then Lizzie found one of the maids had been approached and Arthur recognized the name she gave. One of your men.” She’d sat back in her chair, a distinctly unimpressed air about her. “We had the maid he was trying to bribe send word she had something for him. He told us you’d had him digging up information on what happened to Tommy. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought Tommy was with you in Margate.”

Fucking Ollie, using his own fucking name and spilling everything to boot. Ollie’d never been cut out for this kind of work, he’d probably folded at the first idle threat. After his victory with the orderly he’d gotten overconfident, hadn’t he. Sloppy. “Why you, and not your brother?”

Ada glanced towards the balcony. “Arthur would have shot you on sight and not bothered to find out why Tommy’d come here in the first place. I found your letters in his desk. I thought… a more cautious approach might be best.”

Fucking hell. Those letters had gone unanswered, right, so who would have pegged Tommy to be the sort to keep his correspondence rather than chucking it into the fire? “And Arthur? Listened to reason, did he?”

Ada shrugged. “For now.” Not much of a guarentee that Arthur Shelby wouldn’t still show up on his doorstep ready for murder, was it.

“So you’re sure he’s not my hostage, you know, that I didn’t nick him off the street to get my revenge?”

“You should probably let your maid in on the plan, then.” Ada said. “Co-conspirators don’t usually offer tea when they’re discovered.”

“Hmm, right.” On the balcony, Tommy was lighting his second cigarette, his jaw set. How long was he going to let this play out, like it had nothing to do with him? If Alfie kept prying into his personal business, maybe it’d spark a reaction. Worth a try, wasn’t it, and if it didn’t, it might still produce useful intelligence. “So now we’ve established your brother is free to come and go as he pleases, and that my informant proved susceptible to interrogation, maybe you’d consider relieving me of my curiousity about certain missing pieces of this puzzle, right, to save me the trouble of finding another more reliable investigator.”

That earned him an aborted movement from the balcony, like Tommy’d started to turn and then thought better of it. He was gripping the marble bannister with the hand Alfie could see, white-knuckled.

“So you don’t send more spies, you mean?” Ada studied him for a moment. “When the next one’s found out, he might not be as lucky as the last. What is it you want to know?”

Hell, Alfie had a long list of things, didn’t he, but he started with what he thought might be the least volatile item. And from what Ollie’d said, Tommy’d been drugged when he’d been secreted out of Bedlam, so it was very possible this was a gap in his own knowledge to boot.

“Your uncle bribed an orderly to hand Tommy over to him. But you said you all thought he was dead, right, so how did you come to that obviously erroneous conclusion?”

Ada hesitated, lips pressed together, waiting for Tommy to jump in maybe. When he didn’t -- he’d turned back to the sea again, cigarette smoke drifting out to join the puffy white clouds over the water -- she sighed.

“They’d been to visit him, Curly and Charlie.” Alfie had no fucking idea who Curly might be, but he filed it away for some other time. “Curly wouldn’t leave it alone, kept insisting Tommy needed the open air, and Charlie’d never… he hadn’t wanted Tommy there in the first place. None of what they’d planned came out until after the hospital called and told us he was dead.” She seemed to be speaking more to Tommy than him, the words pouring from her like they’d built up until she couldn’t contain them. “Got him as far as Coventry when there was a problem with the engine and they had to salvage some spare parts. They thought he was sleeping, but by the time they got back to the boat he was gone. They searched the canal for two days. Charlie worried he’d drowned, the way our--”

Tommy’s face, when he turned towards the room, stole the rest of whatever she’d meant to say.

“I didn’t expect you to really be here,” she said to him, softly. Having successfully interrupted his sister’s tale, Tommy’d fallen back to his favorite past time: he’d picked a spot across the room somewhere to fix on, near the piano, and was ignoring everything around him. Alfie was used to it by now, but as the silence stretched out he realized Ada was getting unsettled. “Tommy? Fuck, Lizzie’s been worried stiff. You could have let us know where you were. What _have_ you been doing here, anyhow?”

She hadn’t yet mentioned the aunt, and that was interesting, wasn’t it.

Leaving the couch behind, she moved to join Tommy on the balcony, but he came to life again and avoided her approach with a neat sidestep, crossing to the gramophone. She didn’t follow.

“Tom?”

After a moment the piano recording Alfie’d left on the player last started up, a jaunty tinkling completely inappropriate to the moment at hand, and Tommy pulled his notebook from his pocket. Finally.

Ada took the inevitable note from him with an apprehensive tilt of her head, as if he’d handed her a grenade. Which Alfie supposed was fair enough. He’d had a good week to get used to these little telegrams.

“_Listening to music_? What the hell does that mean?”

Alfie didn’t let himself laugh. It wasn’t really funny, was it. Nah, probably not. But the whole scene had gained something of the absurd, and if he was the only one able to appreciate that, well, he supposed it wasn’t the first time.

“What the fuck’s going on? Why won’t you just-- why won’t you talk to me?”

The implications of that question cut through the last of Alfie’s impulse towards laughter. When Tommy didn’t make a move to reply in any fashion, he spoke up. “He don’t really talk to nobody, not if they’re among the visible, anyway.”

The look Tommy shot him weren’t the slightest bit pleased with him. Maybe he should have left off that last bit.

“What?” She turned on him, bewildered. Fuck, this was… he’d just got a handle on things, hadn’t he, or he’d thought he had. And now it was all back to stumbling in the fog.

She took Tommy’s next note like she’d found herself in a dream and hadn’t quite gained her footing yet. “_Go home_,” she read aloud, and then her shoulders collapsed in on themselves. Tommy’s jaw was clenched, a muscle jumping like he was grinding his teeth. “No, Tommy, I thought you were dead. You can’t do this, can’t just send me on my way like a fucking child--”

But Tommy was making for the door. Weren’t much of a surprise, really, but Ada just stood there and watched him go as if she couldn’t believe he was really leaving.

At least he was wearing a fucking coat this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a reminder that you'll need a (free) AO3 account to continue reading this fic in the future. I'll leave it unlocked until I post the next chapter. I have 5 invitations for AO3 accounts! If you need one hit me up in the comments and we'll figure it out.
> 
> **NOTE: I will be locking this fic on March 2nd. After that you won't be able to read it without being logged in to an AO3 account.**
> 
> Thanks everybody who's reading, sorry about this. And thanks again for supporting all of us on AO3.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for warnings specific to this chapter.

“He’ll be back,” Alfie said, as Ada Thorne stood alone in the center of the room, the slips of paper that made up all Tommy’d had to say to her crumpled in one hand. He didn’t know why the fuck he felt the need to provide any comfort, but the words seemed to have a mind of their own. “Might be awhile, though.”

The gramophone played on, entirely too cheery for the moment at hand. If he thought he could get out of his chair and across the room without struggle he would have shut the thing down.

“It’s gotten worse.” Her voice had gone thin. “He--”

“Worse?” At her confusion, he just sighed. “Don’t read so much like riddles these days, his telegrams. Downright straightforward, what he told you just now.”

“This. These… notes.” Ada held up the paper. “You said he’s not… he’s not talking? Not at all?”

“Nah, mate. I said he don’t talk to people who’re alive.”

“How is that _better_?” She’d gone clipped, reminding him for the first time of her brother.

“It’s all relative, innit. When he first arrived he was barely in the room.” He’d gotten overly warm, sitting there still in his overcoat, so he shrugged out of it while he searched for the right way to construct his next question. “I gathered he was in Bedlam, right. But you’re saying he was speaking to you before that? I’d figured, you know, this thing -- the mutism, whatever you call it -- was part of whatever happened to get him there.”

Ada pulled off her own coat and hat and laid them aside on the couch. Now that she weren’t swathed in fancy wool and fur, it was obvious she was carrying a baby, though Alfie weren’t experienced enough to judge how far along she was. She didn’t sit. Maybe pacing ran in the family.

“Why do you want to know about this?”

The sound of the piano faded away. It was a relief, wasn’t it, the silence.

“Well…” He didn’t have a good answer for that, did he? Not really. “He showed up here on his own, Tommy, and seems intent on sticking around. And since he’s no longer in the habit of answering direct questions, not that he ever was, you know, I’ve had to resort to other means of gathering intelligence about the fucking situation, right--”

“You mean your spy.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t offer an apology. Wasn’t sure she expected one.

“I don’t understand,” she said, finally taking a seat again. “Why’d he leave the boat? It was the January, he would have recognized it even if he woke up alone. They’d almost reached Birmingham. If he’d got confused, why come all the way here?”

The fucking January again. “I don’t have any fucking clue about that, right, I’ve spent this past week failing to come to any conclusions about it, but maybe the real question is why he didn’t head back home instead, innit. Why he told you to leave, just now.”

There was a story there, that was obvious, that’d been obvious since Tommy first appeared in this very chair last Friday. Ollie, before he’d been found out, had filled in the edges for him, but there was still a gaping sinkhole in the middle, weren’t there. A sinkhole called Bedlam.

“I didn’t think he’d still be angry with me.” She was studying her hands, Ada Thorne, where they was clasped in her lap, cradling her belly. “His doctor tried to get him into a private clinic in the countryside, but they wouldn’t… they refused to take him. Didn’t matter we could pay, they said he’d be a danger to the other patients, because of who he was.”

Fucking toffs. “This was after Mosley’s speech, yeah?”

Ada nodded. “Nobody knew what had happened, what had gone wrong. He walked off on Arthur afterwards and just… vanished. His gardener found him the next morning, covered in mud and… we tried our best, but he wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat or drink anything. He wasn’t making any fucking sense, kept saying he didn’t need it, insisting we were trying to poison him. Then it got worse. He’d been on laudanum and… that wouldn’t have been so bad, we could have got him through it, but then the DTs set in and Dr. Brooke said it’d kill him. There wasn’t any choice.”

Fuck. “Bedlam, then.”

“Yeah.” She covered her face for a moment before going on. “It was… There’s a hospital in Birmingham but everyone in the fucking city would have known. In London he’s not… not as recognizable. I don’t know why I’m fucking telling you this.”

“Don’t suppose he went quietly, Tommy.”

She shook her head and didn’t elaborate, but maybe she didn’t need to. She was still carrying the moment in the lines of her face.

“How’d they feed him in the asylum? He’s not dead, you know, so they must have convinced him somehow.”

“They had to… look, it was terrible, okay? It was all terrible, and none of us wanted that for him, but he didn’t… he didn’t seem to understand we didn’t have a choice. It’d been a week by then. When they came to take him to Bedlam he started screaming at us and nobody could calm him down, he tried to--”

She broke off, gone a little shaky, so he let her take a moment. It was clear she was leaving a great deal out of the story but pushing for more, he being a stranger to her and all, most likely would just shut her down altogether.

“Yeah, alright, that’s a vivid enough picture, innit.” Holding Tommy down as Marie’d stuck him came back to him again, a hot coal in his belly. He’d got used to the indignities of patienthood, right, where nurses did what they felt best to keep your flesh going, and that had been his touchstone through all of this with Tommy; but that weren’t the half of it. He’d known that, even said as much to Tommy, but this... Fuck.

“Is he… is he still seeing Grace?”

The dead wife. Oh, bloody hell. Alfie supposed he should have figured that out for himself, but it had been five years since she’d expired, hadn’t it, and he’d forgotten.

“He’s seeing something,” he ventured. “There’s a couple of ‘em he talks to, but one he don’t. Yeah, that might be her. Used a word in your language, right,” he rummaged through the debris on the table next to him until he found the torn page he’d saved and showed it to her. “It was the first thing he wrote down.”

“Muli,” she read. “It’s like a ghost, or a… a spirit. They, uh, sometimes they come to take revenge for their death.”

“Sounds right. Any time it shows he unravels at the seams.”

“He was seeing her before all...this.” Ada said. So he’d told the truth about that, then, the other night. “I didn’t… I thought it was the laudenum. Maybe it was, I dunno. But if he’s still seeing her now… he’s not got access to opium here, has he?”

Tommy’d told him about smuggling the opium. He hadn’t, of course, mentioned taking any himself.

“Nah,” Alfie said. “Not likely. Marie thought it was from all the shit they had him on in Bedlam.”

“Maybe it runs in the family. My aunt started seeing spirits, after she was nearly… a few years ago. And our mother--”

_It’s in the blood,_ Tommy’d written. Alfie hadn’t understood what he’d meant. “They real, d’you think, the spirits your aunt sees?”

One of her brows rose at the question, as if she was uncertain whether he was mocking her. “She’s been right about some things, things she had no way of knowing. But what Tommy told me… it was different. He kept talking about Grace as if she was alive. He showed up at my house in the middle of the night, insisting he’d seen her on one of our boats. I dunno, he’s never been one for that stuff, seances and the like.”

He thought of the mask of terror on Tommy’s face that first time he’d found him, the way the hair on the back of his own neck had stood on end. What Tommy’d written about it afterwards. “Don’t think she’s alive when he sees her now. And the others, the ones he talks to, he seems to know they’re dead.”

“Fuck.” She deflated a bit more, sinking into the cushions. “I’d hoped, with time…”

“Look. You said he weren’t eating before Bedlam, right? That he weren’t making sense. So he still sees his dead wife and talks to ghosts at night and don’t have much to say to us with his fucking mouth. But he communicates in his own way when he wants to. I don’t always know what he intends at first but there’s meaning there, you know, it ain’t nonsense. And Marie’s got him taking meals again.”

She looked away, out the balcony doors, where Tommy’d stood. “We need him back,” she said softly. “That’s not… back.”

Sometimes there was no back. Alfie knew that more than most, these days. “Back to what? How’ve you explained his absence in Parliament?”

“Said he was on holiday. There was the Christmas recess, which helped, so he’s only missed a few weeks. We’d managed to keep it fucking quiet until your man started stirring up gossip among the maids again.”

Gossip among the maids, hmm. Years ago, after Tommy’d had his head stove in by the priest, the maid Ollie’d gotten friendly with for intelligence purposes had told him Tommy’d been walking the halls at night, talking to his dead wife. At the time Alfie’d chalked it up to a girl who’d spent too much time at the pictures inflating mundane household scuttlebutt into epic proportions for Ollie’s benefit -- and coin. When he’d prodded Tommy with the tale, looking to provoke a reaction, he hadn’t even blinked. But chances were he’d been on a shitload of morphine after his stint in the hospital, right, so maybe there’d been something to it. Maybe none of this was so new after all.

“Tommy listens to me, sometimes,” Ada Thorne sighed. “I thought… if he’d come here on his own, he might let me bring him home.”

There was movement, then, just beyond the balcony. Something dark against the white sand of the beach and the bright blue swathe of sky. Alfie levered himself up, all his muscles weeping and moaning in complaint, and peered outside, squinting.

“Hmm. Don’t think he’s too keen on that idea, love.”

It was Tommy, of course, returned sooner than Alfie’d expected, standing with his hands clasped behind his back watching the waves roll and crash.

Ada rose to her feet as well. “If he’d let me explain--”

“Doubt he’s in the mood for explanations yet, since he’s out there and not in here. I’d say that’s a pretty definite fucking statement of where his head’s at when it comes to hearing any more from you right now.”

“Fuck,” she said, turning away from the balcony.

“Situations come up, right, where there ain’t a good move for anybody involved. But it has a fucking impact, when you take away a man’s choices, even if you think you’re helping him.” Alfie pulled his coat back on with a sigh, hoping his legs would hold him. “Let me give it a try, yeah?”

Arthur’d have barrelled out there and started shouting and made everything worse. If it’d been Arthur who’d come looking for Tommy, Alfie’d probably have a bullet in his skull, or have lost the other fucking eye. He supposed that meant something, that this girl had come instead, alone and pregnant as she was.

“Not making any promises,” he said, and left her behind.

Coat open and whipping around him in the wind, Tommy stood at attention just on the edge of the water, the austere lines of his face barely papering over something skittish and bruised. Alfie came to a lurching stop next to him in the sand and leaned on the handle of his cane, mustering up some opening, reaching through the muck of the past hour for something to say.

Tommy beat him to it. “Fuck off.”

“Yeah,” he said, squashing his surprise. “Alright.”

When he didn’t make a move to head back into the house or comment on the newest addition to Tommy’s utterances to the living, Tommy pulled his notebook from the inner pocket of his coat. Alfie hadn’t brought out his spectacles, but he did have a little lens on a chain that worked in a pinch.

> Had your fill of scandal?

“Hmm.” So he was pissed, and not just at his sister. “For the time being.” He let the waves fill the next moment, waiting to see if Tommy had anything else he needed to get off his chest, but nothing came. “You got something more to say to Ms. Thorne in there or should I send her on her way?”

“No.”

“No you’re done talking to your sister or no I should ask her to stay for--”

The glare, at least, lacked ambiguity.

“You know they’re not gonna just leave it be, now they know where you are, right. Your brother, that aunt, they’re not the type to--”

But Tommy had turned and was marching away down the beach.

Fucking hell.

Ada Thorne had taken up her brother’s usual spot by the balcony doors, staring in the direction Tommy’d disappeared in, so it was likely she’d been watching and had got the gist of the conversation, short as it was, hadn’t she.

“Shelby Company errand-boy was not what I had in mind for my day,” he groused, stripping off his coat and filing it away in the hall closet. “It’s a job for a kid, innit. If this was going to go on much longer I’d hire one from town to ferry messages back and forth, save my poor bones the trouble.”

“He’s not coming back,” Ada said.

“Oh, he’ll be back, just needs to walk it off a bit. When you don’t talk much the pressure builds up like steam in a kettle, right, needs an outlet so it don’t blow the top of your fucking skull off, or that’s my nearest guess, anyhow, not having experienced the state myself.” When she turned, frowning, he shrugged. “I know what you meant. And I think he made himself clear on that point before he left.”

“I can’t just-- I can’t leave like this, leave him here--”

“Why the fuck not?” Alfie settled himself back in his chair and considered the girl.

“He’s my brother. It isn’t like him, to just… hide. Like this.”

“Hmm.” This was going to take some delicate work, wasn’t it, if he wanted to get her to leave on good terms and not bring the whole fucking Shelby organization down on his head out of some kind of misguided rescue attempt for someone clearly didn’t want rescuing. “For the first bit of the war nobody was granted leave, were they. You’re old enough to remember how it went. Why bother with all that fucking trouble, shipping men back and forth for a holiday, when you expect your enemy to fold to your superior force at any moment, yeah? But the fighting dragged on, so they faced reality and started giving lads a few days at home before they was due back at the front, bright-eyed and ready to kill again.”

At least one of her brothers must have gotten leave, so none of this could be news to her. “Ten days, they gave me once, and it went by like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Ten days break, after two years in the fucking mud. Didn’t get another for a year and a half, and then it was only three. Not even enough time to get to London, wash the mud off, and hop back on the boat, so I pissed it away in a pub somewhere behind the lines.”

He’d thought it was obvious, what he was saying, but he’d lost her. Civilians never got it; it was all just stories to them.

“If you was wounded they might give you enough to recover before they sent you off to get shelled again, but it weren’t much of a real break, stuck in a ward with a hundred other moaning fucks.” Alfie smoothed his beard, searching for the right words. He’d never bothered to take as much trouble giving form to his thoughts as he had with Tommy this past week, and now his fucking sister. It was a chore, picking and choosing, giving care to whether he was understood clearly. “Sounds like he’d been bleeding awhile from older blows, Tommy. But my guess is what happened to send him to Bedlam, that was an injury, innit, as much as if he’d been shot in the head. Then that place, the asylum, it infected the wound. Like gas gangrene.”

Ada turned away, gave a little nod.

“Yeah. So he’s been here a week. Long enough for the infection to clear a bit, but the wound ain’t closed yet. Dunno if it will, too early to tell. But you ship him back to the front you’ll never fucking find out.” That seemed to have sunk in, enough that she bit back whatever else it was she wanted to say. “So if you caught the early train and aren’t eager to hop back on a return journey just yet, the Cliftonville’s a decent hotel. Lovely view of the Promenade. Restful.”

Ada Thorne was a sharp one, that much was clear, and she didn’t need him to get any more blunt than that about the end of her welcome. She wrapped herself in her coat and hat and picked up her handbag. Fished inside it and brought out a little white card, which she handed to him. Business card, from the looks, though he didn’t bother to try to read the tiny print.

“My home number, in London,” she said. “If he… if he changes his mind.”

“I imagine it’s impossible to prevent Arthur Shelby from doing whatever the fuck he wants, but I’d appreciate if you did what you could to keep him off my doorstep. If that aunt of yours has any sway, right--”

But she was frowning again, a pained pinch to her that hadn’t even been there when they’d been discussing how Tommy’d ended up in fucking Bedlam. “Arthur will listen to me,” was all she said about the matter, and then she was gone, taking the intrusion of the outside world and all its reminder of troubles with her.

Maybe Margate weren’t Hell or Purgatory or any of that mythological shit after all. Maybe Margate was just a fucking recovery ward.

The question then, right, became whether Alfie was still a patient himself.

Three o’clock in the fucking morning and Tommy was pacing the lightless cluttered length of Alfie’s sitting room, talking to his ghosts again, the one he’d addressed before in the tongue of his people. Alfie supposed he could have more than one visiting ghost of Romani derivation, but his tone of voice was the same as it’d been earlier in the week, something disturbingly close to a frightened child in the dark.

Alfie paused on the threshold to the room. A chill had roused him from his bed, seeking the source, and here it was: the balcony doors stood open, letting in a steady flood of winter air and a faint glimmer of moonlight. He’d spent most of the day outside, Tommy, reappearing well after his sister had departed. Must’ve still been angry, because he’d stuck to the kitchen with Marie where he knew Alfie couldn’t comfortably tarry, then shut himself in the guest bedroom and ignored Marie’s invitation to dinner. Whether he’d slept or just sat in there staring at the wall and smoking, he’d been silent when Alfie had retired at ten.

There was a long pause, as if Tommy was listening to counsel from whoever he was seeing. Then: “It’s too late to stop it now. I failed. So sim te kerav, mam? What am I supposed to do?”

It was the most he’d heard Tommy say to this particular haunt. The other occasion had consisted of short, plaintive phrases, near begging, and none of them in English. There was, of course, no one in the room with him, least not of the corporeal sort. But in the wake of Ada Thorne’s mention of their aunt’s facility with spirits it occured to Alfie to wonder whether Tommy had carried this flock of ghosts with him to Margate after all. When it came to the world of spirits it was better to exercise caution, wasn’t it, which made avoiding angering whoever the fuck Tommy consulted the wisest choice at the moment. And if there were no visitors, if they were, as he’d previously assumed, delusions, well, avoiding interruption became another sort of precaution.

“It doesn’t… it doesn’t get better. Charlie said it’s best to keep moving, but it’s a tunnel that goes down and down and fills in after you the more you dig.” He broke off, somewhere near the gramophone by the shape of him, dark moving against dark. “Is that why you did it? To just... stop?”

“S’not good to ask ‘em too many questions, mate,” Alfie said, some time after Tommy had drifted into silence. He switched on a lamp.

Narrowly haggard in the dim light, recognition seeped into the inky pits of Tommy’s eyes as if pulled to the surface from a fathomless depth.

“Who?” Tommy said, finally.

“A new addition to the list, ‘who.’” Alfie remained where he was, just inside the room. “Ghosts, right, you know. Ask ‘em too many questions and eventually they might give you an honest answer. Being how they’re dead and all, the impact of these revelations on the living tend to be lost on ‘em.”

Tommy stared at him, a photograph of himself caught motionless in a flashbulb’s glare, still in yesterday’s clothes and the same look he’d worn when Alfie’d told him about dreaming of the black horse back before Mosely’s speech. After that first incident last Sunday night they hadn’t discussed the matter of Tommy’s occasional conversations with invisible companions, and he must’ve been under the mistaken assumption nobody had taken further notice of the matter.

“Hmm.” Alfie crossed the length of the room to the balcony, stepping out onto the frost-edged marble. The sea was a black crashing void, fading seamlessly into the night sky. He waited a moment, two, three, then turned back round to the sitting room.

Tommy, of course, was no longer there.

Alfie nodded to himself. “Yeah. Late, innit, Thomas.” He closed and locked the doors behind him, extinguished the lamp and stood for a moment in the dark. “If you’re still hanging round, right, you might take some time off,” he said to the empty room, to any lingering spirit. “Find yourself another ear to bend for awhile. Go explore your afterlife, if you people believe in one, the Elysian fields and all that. The beaches are much nicer there, I suspect, than in fucking Margate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reference to past, off-screen disordered eating, delusions, and institutionalization against the character's will.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see end notes for content warnings specific to this chapter.

> _A man with a bandage is in the middle of something. _
> 
> _Everyone understands this. Everyone wants a battlefield. _
> 
> \--Richard Siken, Detail of the Fire

Words trickled in, or maybe they leaked out. It was hard to tell, wasn't it, given Alfie still didn’t know what had dammed them up to start with. But they’d come, a drip drip at first, _no, yeah, yes_. Then crushed out like blood from a stone: _stop, stop, please_. The girl’s name. _Fuck off_, now that had been a whole sentence, hadn’t it, a declarative slap upside the head, a wave smacking the unsuspecting bather. And _who_, a question. Well, not really a question, more a deflection, but the two were sometimes the same thing, weren't they. A muddy river diverted off its natural path. Because of course Tommy’d known who he’d been talking to with all those words, English and Romani alike, and of course Alfie hadn’t a fucking clue, because whoever it was they was dead, or not really there, or both.

Maybe it was more like a thaw. Yeah, that fit better than anything else, because it weren’t like Tommy’d started chattering away to anyone but the invisible after his sister left. Most of his words were still encased in ice, weren’t they, but something had shifted, a change in the temperature. A gradual seep, like blood through a bandage.

But that was mixing up his metaphors, innit.

Hard to see it at first, though, that shift, because Tommy spent the next two days acting as if Alfie didn’t exist. Something of an accomplishment, right, given he was occupying Alfie’s guest room -- whether he did any sleeping there was debatable -- and eating Alfie’s food at Alfie’s kitchen table, and still passing the occasional communique to Alfie’s nurse. He’d walk right past Alfie’s couch -- with Alfie in it -- to get to the balcony, where he’d stand against the cloud smudged sky and smoke or sit in the wrought iron chair and smoke some more, then cross back again to the kitchen, or his room, or the door to the outside world. Alfie gave up trying to engage him after the first morning. He spent most of his time on the beach, Tommy, either on one of his walks or just sitting in the sand, half hidden by the brittle remnants of last year’s beach grass. Then eventually he’d come in to warm up and start the whole bloody routine again.

Two days of that, yeah, but on the morning of the third Tommy had stalked past Alfie as per fucking usual and threw open the balcony doors only to be met with a downpour. Alfie just watched, a little amused by that point, maybe even a little smug, while Tommy did the math and realized the rain was coming down too hard for his cigarette to stay lit, the only part of the equation that appeared to have prevented him from just standing out there getting soaked through out of sheer obstinacy.

“Yeah,” Alfie said, when he turned back to the room with a huff. “Quite a day we’re having, innit, Thomas.”

“Go to hell,” Tommy snapped, then disappeared back into his room.

“Three in a row,” Alfie muttered to himself, and drained off the last of his tea. “Ladies and gentlemen, are we taking bets on four?”

He ventured out for his tablets around lunchtime and took another opportunity to glare through the balcony doors at the weather and give Alfie the brush-off, but by then Alfie’s amusement had worn thin.

“You bored yet, Tommy?” Tommy wouldn’t look at him, but he hadn’t stalked away. There was a coiled irritation to him that was probably at least half pent-up energy he usually spent traipsing through the sand. “Can’t go outside with the weather like this, can you, so what’re you occupying yourself with in there besides treading a rut into the floorboards?”

It was a shock any words at all made it out past the clench of his jaw. “Fuck off.”

“Yeah, yeah, already used that one on me. Lost its novelty, hasn’t it.” Alfie shifted, toying with the leather case he’d had tucked away the last few days, waiting for an opening. Tommy’s gaze tripped over the slim thing and skidded off again, but not before Alfie’d seen the flash of recognition, edged with something like the look a man got when he’d been without water for days and you waved a canteen in his face. “Hmm. Yeah. So I’ve got a deal for you. We sit here and discuss what precisely the fuck has driven you to blackball me in my own house, right, while you have the nerve to continue partaking of my generous hospitality, and in return you can have these back.”

Didn’t ask where Alfie’d gotten the case from, because there was really only one answer to that -- Ada Thorne had given it to him, before she’d left. Nestled inside was a pair of glasses. Expensive, from the looks of the frames. Fashionable, probably, though Alfie wouldn’t know. He’d fully intended to hand them over right away but Tommy’d started in with the boycott and, well, here they were. He’d never claimed to be a man free of pettiness.

A calculating look had come over Tommy: doing the odds, judging whether he could just take what he wanted, and if he did, how much of a fight it’d be.

“Fucking hell,” Alfie sighed. “It was a piss-poor attempt at an olive branch, right, not blackmail. If it’s gonna be like that you can just fucking have them, mate.”

He held the case out and Tommy snatched it from him and disappeared. He hadn’t taken any reading material with him, which rather defeated the purpose of the entire exchange, but Alfie supposed it was something.

“You’re usually smarter than that, you know.” Marie stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.

“While I can’t pretend to follow what the fuck you’re talking about,” he grumbled in her direction, still put out that his gambit had failed. “I’m confident you’ll share your thoughts on the subject with me whether I’m interested in them or not.”

She lifted a brow and took a seat across from him, in the armchair Tommy hadn’t occupied since his sister’s visit. “You’ve been locked up before, haven’t you. Done time.”

“Marie--”

“I know what some of those markings mean,” she said, with a gesture he supposed referred to his tattoos. “It was before the war. I did me research.”

“Yeah, okay, very thorough, you know, that’s admirable, innit--”

“What did they do, when they threw you in the clink, hm? What’s the first thing they did?”

“You mean besides kick the shit out of me?” He knew what she was driving at now, but he weren’t going to make it easy for her, was he.

“They took away everything you had.”

He held back a snarl, but not by much. “And what the fuck would you know about it?”

“You think only gangsters find themselves on the wrong end of the billy club?” Marie sniffed, then stood, looking down at him. “If you want to get anywhere, lay off the games. Whatever you were used to, he doesn’t have it in him right now.”

And that was an understatement, wasn’t it. But when the evening paper arrived, curling damply at the edges, an opportunity presented itself. Alfie half expected his knock to go unanswered but after a long moment during which he could hear Tommy pacing in the background, the door opened. He waited, but Tommy didn’t say anything, just glared a challenge out at him. So he held up the paper like an offering.

“S’only the _Radio Times_, you know, but it’s fresh from the press.” Tommy was still clutching the fucking eyeglass case in one hand, like if he set it down it might vanish on him. “If you don’t want it--”

Tommy took the paper from him, frowning down at the headline. _IOLANTHE_, it declared, next to a drawing of some duchess or the like in a skirt outdated two hundred years ago, comically square in the hips like she was trying to smuggle one of them giant paintings Tommy had in his manor underneath her petticoats.

“Gilbert and Sullivan, dunno who those fucks are, but if the illustration is any indication it’s not a programme aimed at the likes of us.”

Tommy’d flipped the thing open and was squinting down at a full page advert for batteries as if it meant something.

“So,” Alfie scratched at his beard. “Yeah. Don’t hoard walls of the things like you do, mate, but there’s a selection of books scattered around the place, right, and some of ‘em are even in English. You’re welcome to whatever you can dig up.”

He was turning away when it came, quiet but definite. “Thank you.”

“Hmm. Would’ve handed those over sooner, you know, if you hadn’t been set on perfecting the cold shoulder.” It was itchily close to an apology, and if it didn’t quite fit his mouth, well, he got all the words out in the right order, didn’t he.

Tommy met his gaze, the animosity of the past few days mostly drained away into something deeply weary. Gave him a short nod then retreated back into his room and shut the door.

Morning brought a truce of sorts, Alfie supposed, because when he ventured out for breakfast Tommy was already in his favorite armchair with a book, the frames of his spectacles stark against his washed-out features. He’d picked up a little color over the last week, but the pale February sun hadn’t yet countered the time he must have spent without any sunlight at all. Outside was still nothing but steel grey, the ocean invisible behind the heavy curtain of rain. So that much hadn’t changed.

Before Alfie could venture a greeting or take a gander at what Tommy was reading, the jangling of the telephone pulled him away down the hall to the office. Since the possibilities were limited, right, Alfie took a gamble.

“So, Oliver,” he said when he lifted the receiver.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line, enough that Alfie started to doubt his own judgment of the situation. But no, here was Ollie, appropriately chagrined. “You must’ve heard by now, then.”

Alfie sighed. “I take it you remain whole after your sojourn among the Shelbys?”

“They kept me at the bloody house until the sister got back.” Which answered the question Alfie hadn’t asked rather than the one he had.

“Hmm, alright, I got the picture. They mount any parts of you over the mantel as trophies?”

“M’fine,” Ollie said, hangdog. “They didn’t even fire the fucking maid, since she snitched on me.”

“She should thank you, probably earned her a raise.”

That got him a half-hearted laugh, at least, so Ollie’d be okay. “Boss, look--”

“You learn something from your little adventure, hmm?”

“Yeah, Tommy Shelby’s not your hostage after all, which they’d have known if they bothered to listen to anything I said, that and I’m apparently not worth ransoming.” Well, that was more spunk than Ollie usually showed, wasn’t it.

“Yeah, alright,” Alfie said. “You’re home now, I take it.”

“Couldn’t get much out of any of ‘em, but there’s some kind of feud in the family. A cousin’s taken over the business, made his move when Shelby was locked up. I heard them arguing about it. They’re desperate to get him back, at least the older one is. The sister didn’t have him with her when they let me go so I assume he’s still--”

“Yeah, Ollie, whatever conclusion you’ve come to, it’s approximately accurate.” Tommy’d mentioned a traitor, days ago, hadn’t he. “They think this cousin sabotaged things the night of the speech?”

“Dunno. Didn’t sound like it.”

“The aunt didn’t step in? Thought she was on the board.”

“The aunt’s his mother.” Ah. “Never saw her at the house. Just the sister and brother and Shelby’s wife.”

All of whom, last Alfie’d paid attention to the matter, had also been on the board. Hmm.

“Right. Well, that’s certainly enlightening, innit.” Ollie’d been a good manager, back in the distillery, but he weren’t cut out for espionage, that was clear. A commander worth his salt never put his soldier into a position he couldn’t handle, so all of the shit that had happened, that was his own bad judgment, wasn’t it. Or limited options. Couldn’t blame Ollie for that. “Why don’t you take yourself on a holiday after all your trials and tribulations. Steer clear of the Peakies for awhile. But if you hear anything, while you’re out and about--”

“Sure, yeah. ‘Course. And it won’t happen again, boss, I--”

“Right, no, I understand, don’t I. Good lad.”

Alfie set the receiver down on the cradle and sat back in his chair, rubbing at his neck. He’d skipped out on his massage yesterday and was feeling it now, in a tightening up of all his moving parts.

_We need him back_, Ada Thorne had said, but she hadn’t mentioned why.

_Stole the fucking crown_, Tommy’d written.

But that had been about the opium, hadn’t it? And the opium weren’t something that would’ve passed through the board of directors of a legitimate fucking corporation. Strictly off the books cargo, opium. The fate of Shelby Company Limited was none of his concern, but he imagined the news of a coup would alarm Tommy, which meant the choice now, right, was how to tell him. When to tell him. Or _whether_ to tell him.

Fuck.

Funny how the air in a room could turn from one moment to the next, could be mild enough when you left it only to seethe when you returned. Tommy was still in his chair with his open book, but odds that he’d read a word anytime recently were slim. There was a fight here waiting for a spark to set it off, so might as well fucking get it over with.

Alfie took a seat before he threw down his opening play. “Look, mate, I’m not gonna force a negotiation this time, that was poor fucking tactics on my part, you know, but this can’t stand, the way things are, can it. Am I wrong to assume your current state of discontent has something to do with my call just now?”

Tommy didn’t lift his eyes from the book. The words when they came were low and tight with venom. “You had no right--”

And that was four. If he was going to increase the length of his utterances by one word a day, by the end of the year they might achieve an entire conversation.

“No right to what?”

The seething air went heavy, like there was an avalanche of words waiting behind that glare, but Tommy didn’t reach for his notebook. “Ollie.”

Either he’d guessed or he’d listened at the fucking door or this was about Ollie’s original attempt to gather information on him. Alfie didn’t suppose it mattered. “Hmm. Maybe I overstepped, yeah,” he said, “But you wasn’t answering questions at first, mate. You telling me if the situation’d been reversed, you would have just let it be, let it play out without gathering what facts might be available to you?”

Silence.

“It ain’t just Ollie you’re pissed at, it’s that I talked to your sister, and what we might have had words about after you left. Am I right?”

Silence.

“How much do you remember of all that, before you got here, I mean?” Behind the round lenses, Tommy blinked. He was still taut with rage but the question seemed to have caught him up short, so Alfie pressed on. “You recall telling your sister you thought they was poisoning you?”

“Yes,” he said to his book. He didn’t, of course, elaborate.

While Alfie’d noted it at the time there’d been other things on his fucking mind, yeah, and then he’d forgotten about it, but the night of the fever Tommy had scrutinized his every move while he’d made tea, checking to make sure nothing was in the teacup. He hadn’t put up any fuss when Marie’d pressed food on him later, though, so whatever had driven the suspicion seemed to have passed.

“What was that about, then?”

The look Tommy turned on him escaped his immediate ability to interpret. It certainly weren’t friendly, more wary than murderous. This time, he put pen to paper.

> sometimes I’m king
> 
> Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar
> 
> And so I am

More bloody King Richard, no doubt. “Can’t say I follow, you know, as poetical as that may be.”

> Poisoned against me.

That wasn’t… they seemed to have swerved away from the question at hand, jumped the track, so to speak. “Who’s poisoned against you, mate?” The cousin came to mind, the takeover of the company, but he didn’t know how much Tommy knew about that yet.

> They all fucking need the king until
> 
> until the chair is empty until the king
> 
> is a beggar

Alfie weighed dragging the conversation back on track, but it was clear Tommy was trying to communicate something here. Or that the original question was one he was avoiding. Hard to say how intentional that was, wasn’t it, but either way his half of the conversation hadn’t been this disjointed in over a week.

“Suppose if I am a god, you can give yourself a crown, only fair. So did you lose your throne or did you give it up, mate, which--”

“No,” Tommy said. He dropped the book to his lap and lit a cigarette. “Your spy, your fucking…” Alfie waited this time, and after Tommy’d inhaled enough smoke to choke an elephant and blew it all out again, he picked up his train of thought, halting as it had been. “Your fucking _questions_.”

“The questions don’t bother you, Tommy, do they. Not really. It’s the fucking answers bother you.”

“You’ll be poisoned too.” Sounded like an accusation, that.

“Being a god and therefore immortal, not to mention retired, I have no fucking use for your throne, right, so whatever it is you think has poisoned me, it don’t--”

The book hit the floor with a thud and flutter of disturbed pages as Tommy shot up from his chair. “I fell.” He spoke to the balcony doors, turned away from Alfie such that whatever expression was there it weren’t visible to him, but the words rattled out of him as if shaken loose, nuts and bolts from a blown engine. “I fell behind the wire and the vultures circled and the rats, the rats, the rats came for the body, gnawed on the fucking bones, a-and someone-- someone--”

One of his fists shot out and slammed into the glass door. Didn’t shatter it but shook the whole frame, and his arm drew back for another go.

“Tommy,” Alfie said quietly.

“I haven’t--” His hands pressed flat against the glass, his forehead following, his eyes shut. “I’m not insane.”

“Didn’t say you were.” Alfie took a breath. “Sanity’s not something I’ve ever been accused of possessing, right, not in any great abundance. So take this with a grain of salt, mate, but I think you was of sound fucking mind far longer than is healthy for a man. Keep too tight a grip on the thing and it’s liable to crack from the pressure.”

Didn’t seem like he was listening. Didn’t seem like he was talking to Alfie anymore, not really. “They needed me. To-to handle things. Everything.” Now the dam had burst the words rushed out, tumbling over each other, sweeping aside the shelter built by his silence, scouring it down to bedrock. “You don’t fucking-- you don’t feed a fucking corpse, do you, if you don’t burn ‘em the dead are food for everything else, eh, for the rats and the maggots. In the ground or in the mud, that’s how it goes, it’s nature, that’s all. You don’t expect a corpse to _eat_. You can’t force it to fucking swallow, _that’s_ insanity.”

Alfie took that in, picking through the debris to follow the path of his thoughts back to the source. “So the king was dead, then, and that’s why the throne was empty?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said to the glass.

“He still dead, the king?”

Tommy swiped a shaky hand over his face. “They don’t bleed once they’ve begun to rot.”

_Had to check_, Tommy’d told him, when Alfie asked why he’d cut himself. “No, they don’t.”

“They wouldn’t let me-- they didn’t understand. Ada. The others.” His jaw worked, outrage there, still fresh. “Wouldn’t let me put it to a test. If you’re already dead you can’t fucking kill yourself. It’s just logic.”

He’d known Ada Thorne had left a lot out of her tale, but fucking hell. “That why you stopped talking? ‘Cause dead men don’t talk any more than they eat?”

Tommy rolled his head to the side to stare at him, still pressed to the glass door like it was all that was holding him up. For a moment Alfie thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then: “I wish they fucking wouldn’t.”

Right. An obvious mistake, wasn’t it.

“No one _listened_. Every bloody thing I said was an excuse to do what they’d already fucking planned. I told them. I told them death is a kindness but they wouldn’t listen. It got harder to pass word down the line, there was too much dirt and I had no hands, no hands to dig with and they--”

He’d gone unfocused, a film fallen over his eyes like he’d become again the corpse he said he’d been.

“Alright,” Alfie said, when he didn’t continue. “Well, if you was dead then you don’t seem to be anymore, do you. Bled when cut and all that. Must’ve been resurrected when you wasn’t looking, hmm?”

“Yeah,” Tommy agreed, but there was no life to the word.

“Being dragged back from the afterlife ain’t for the faint-hearted,” Alfie said. “Whether it’s lying on the sand out there, the tide lapping at your toes, or in some cell in Bedlam, you know, finding yourself among the living again is a rude fucking awakening, innit.”

Tommy’s eyes were shut where he was pressed against the glass of the balcony doors. Outside the clouds roiled and spat out torrents of rain, obliterating the world beyond the balcony, closing them in.

“That where it happened for you, in Bedlam?”

His throat moved in a swallow. “No.”

Alfie just nodded and didn’t press further. As if his knees had gone on strike, Tommy folded slowly to the floor and sat there slumped against the balcony door, drawn back into himself. Didn’t look much like a living thing right then, bleached and brittle as driftwood, but that was the nature of resurrection, wasn’t it. The only promise it delivered was the relentless endurance of the engine that animated your battered carcass, whether you welcomed it or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reference to past delusions and past self harm and past attempted self harm.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings specific to this chapter in end notes.
> 
> I've fallen a bit behind due to *waves hands around at the world* and though I have chapters 13-14 written I may not post on a strict weekly schedule after this depending on how quickly I can get more written, just to leave myself that cushion and in case anything needs to change in the unposted chapters. Just a heads up.
> 
> Hope everyone is safe and well, and thank you for reading and for all your encouragement.

There were choices a man had to make when he found himself once again in possession of a still-beating heart. A whole range of choices, depending on the circumstances of his death and the condition he was left in upon his return, but at the core of it there was really only one choice, weren’t there. Yeah. Just the one choice, on which all the others were built on, like the foundation of a house. It weren’t a choice anyone could make for you, not really, not if you was determined about it.

Not unless somebody stopped you. Locked you up and stuck you with a fuckload of drugs, kept you caged and comatose. The real question being whether it was really for your own fucking good or for the convenience of everybody else, innit. Didn’t have to feel responsible for nothing that way, right, didn’t have to look too closely at the consequences of annihilation. Didn’t have to listen to a man struggle to piece himself back together afterwards with the only tools left to him, scant and busted up as they were.

Alfie had eventually made his choice, or made some kind of peace with his circumstances anyhow, by telling himself he could always make a different decision at a later date. It still ran through his mind some mornings, or in the dead of night, that option he’d left open, but the siren-song of it had faded over the last year into the occasional passing thought, briefly acknowledged and then let go. Most of the time. When it lingered he got his pistol out and took aim at the passing ships and let the mad banging of it clear away the bullshit between his ears.

Whilst the manner of Tommy’s own demise remained obscure, seemed likely it’d happened after Moseley’s speech. He’d vanished, his sister had said, vanished and then returned the living dead. Weren’t many ways a man could die, left alone on his own land, were there, but the more pressing question was what he’d choose to do now he found himself no longer a corpse. At the moment he seemed caught somewhere between living and deceased, spookily still in that new way he’d tended to drop into without warning since washing up on Alfie’s doorstep. Making up his mind, maybe. It was a private thing, that choice, so Alfie lit his pipe and left him alone. After a good long while he gave up his vigil and retreated to his bedroom, where Marie started on his massage in silence, noticeably gentler about it than usual.

“Should I assume you was listening in to all that?” he asked as her hands smoothed down his flank.

Marie didn’t reply at first, just worked at a knot in the back of his thigh. “As you told Mrs. Thorne,” she said finally, “it’s a wound. Might go deeper than you expected, eh?”

“Hmm.” He swallowed a grunt as the knot released and she moved on. “You still think he should be in a hospital, then?”

Her hands paused, then moved on to manipulate his ankles and feet. “Didn’t seem to be doing him any good, where he’d been,” she allowed. The bruises they’d seen came to mind, didn’t they, and he was sure she was thinking the same. “But his staying here, it’s…”

“Yeah? What is it?” It came out more earnest than challenging, and that hadn’t been his intent at all.

“I suppose I’d ask what sort of obligation to Mr. Shelby you have, to take this on,” she said.

“Haven’t taken anything on, Marie,” he muttered.

“Haven’t you?”

“I’m not fucking _obligated_ to the man.”

“Alright,” she said, and shifted her grip to his other foot. “What’s it about, then?”

“Fucking hell, it’s simple fucking hospitality.” Agitated, he tried to roll onto his back so he could catch sight of her expression, but she just stopped him with a firm hand on one shoulder.

“Known for your hospitality, are you?” There was a thread of humor there, woven in with the more serious undercurrent.

“Yeah, well, you know. Never had the opportunity before, have I.”

She gave his back a pat and let him turn over this time, so he could see her considering him. “It’s a delicate thing, wound like this. Difficult to tell whether it’s airing out or festering.”

“He’s talking now, ain’t he.”

“He was talking when they sent him to Bedlam, according to his sister.”

She had a point, of course, always had some point to make, Marie. “So what’s your counsel, then, from your great well of experience of such things?”

Ignoring his tone, taking the question as he’d meant it, Marie was quiet for a long time, busy fingers digging into the place where his shoulder met his neck. “Step lightly,” she said at last. “It can be like a dance, this. Mightn’t come naturally to a man like you, Mr. Solomons, but let him lead.”

“Thought that’s what I was doing,” he grumbled.

She gave him a nod. “You’ve the occasional good instinct, I’ll give you that. You’ve done well not to argue with him about his delusions, or overreact to ‘em. Never does any good.”

Delusions. Hmm, Alfie supposed that was the way she’d see it, trained as she was. And if Tommy’d talked this way to his family all hell must’ve broken loose. They weren’t used to the places a man’s mind took him when forced past already impossibly stretched limits. “But…”

Marie sighed. “Hospitality might not be enough.”

As if he, of all people, didn’t fucking know that.

Took him a bit to get vertical again, all his workings turned to pudding as they were, but when he did manage to propel himself back to the sitting room he was met by a shushing hiss, like a whisper sent through a bullhorn. The balcony doors stood open again, lace curtains damp at the bottom and billowing inward like sails, water puddling on the black and white tile that picked out _Lethe_. Spilling into the room proper, creeping over the floorboards and just beginning to soak into the edge of the rug. And beyond, silhouette dissolving into the deluge, Tommy Shelby in the rain.

Dramatic sight, he supposed, worthy of the newly resurrected; but as a practical matter a right fucking mess. This? This turn of events was gonna take a load of towels, wasn’t it. He turned and left the tableau behind in favor of the linen closet and weren’t surprised a bit to find that nothing had changed upon his return but the flow of water across the floorboards.

“Did you happen to see an ark out there, by any chance?” No reaction. Probably couldn’t hear him over the incessant downpour. Alfie grumbled to himself, dumping his pile of towels save one onto the couch and stepping over a bit of rug squelching with rainwater. The wind carried a stink of salt and seaweed from the hidden coast and he could just hear the crashing of the waves beneath the onslaught. He put some heft behind his voice this time. “Thomas.”

A gust sent a chilly spray over him as Tommy finally turned, wan and desolate and sodden as a drowned rat. Over the past ten days or so his hair had started to grow back in, just enough to be plastered to his skull and somehow lend him an even more pathetic air than if he’d still been closely shaved. He was in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, both hanging off him now, and he’d been out there long enough -- or the rain was coming down with enough force -- that even his trousers were soaked from waist to ankle. Weren’t a piece of him left dry.

“Right,” Alfie said, for lack of anything else. He held out the towel. “Suppose this might not be up to the task, mate, but there’s more if you need it.” Water ran over Tommy in a second skin as if he was one of them marble statues, dripping from his brow and the tip of his nose and his chin. “Floor can’t get much wetter, can it.”

It took a moment but he stepped onto dry land, and after a long pause like he weren’t sure what was expected of him, reached for the offered towel. With a disapproving grunt at the state of the floor, Alfie moved around him and got the doors shut, the roar of the storm outside cut back to static. Tommy was still just holding the towel, staring down on it, distantly puzzled.

“It’s to dry off, you know--” Tommy blinked at him, eyes pupil-dark beneath clumped lashes, lips gone bluish from cold. “Oh hell, not that it’ll do any good, look like you’ve been dunked in a barrel, don’t you. Just gonna drip all over everything as it is.”

“Alfie,” Tommy said, the towel clenched in his hands.

When he didn’t say nothing more, Alfie prodded him. “Yeah, what?”

“How’d--” He stopped, a shiver running through him, more fucking water spattering the floor. “How d’you do it.”

Didn’t need to ask what he’d meant. Weren’t put as a question, too flat for that, but it was a riddle Alfie’d faced again and again and never found an adequate answer for, until with time the question eased off a bit, came less often and with less urgency, never quite leaving him alone.

“Dunno,” he said finally. “There was a lot of morphine early on, as I said, and that might have helped the worst of it. After that, well. I read, I suppose. Listen to music. When it’s particularly loud in there,” he tapped his own forehead, “I shoot the fucking gulls.” It weren’t the least bit up to the task, but it was all he had. “Different for every man, innit.”

Tommy shook his head and then seemed for the first time to become aware of the wet clothing sticking to him like a shroud. Pulled an expression that might have drawn a chuckle from Alfie under other circumstances, it was so put out, like an alley cat doused with a slop bucket. Swiped the towel over his head and dripping face and with a final, sidelong glance Alfie’s way, sloshed himself through the sitting room and disappeared down the hall, leaving a damp trail in his wake.

Took with him the question that wasn’t a question and the answer he’d have to discover for himself.

The rain lifted after that as if it was a discarded backdrop, scene over, as if this was all some kind of elaborate picture show, right, and though the sky didn’t entirely clear of its heavy grey clouds it did lighten a bit. Alfie bent with a groan and gave the water on the floor a cursory mop with one of the towels he’d brought, then got himself something for lunch, not the least bit shocked when Tommy didn’t emerge again for a good long while. Emerge he did, though, late in the afternoon, snug in a dark green jumper Marie’d bought for him and showing no obvious trace of the morning’s upheaval in anything save an eyeblink’s hesitation as he entered the room and the sphinxlike veneer hastily tacked up over whatever was going on underneath.

Alfie gave a grunt of a greeting and turned the page of the detective yarn he’d been reading without absorbing as Tommy settled in his armchair with his own book again. Finally got a look at the spine of the tome Tommy’d selected for himself and had to choke back appalled laughter.

“Fucking hell. A little light reading for a rainy afternoon, yeah, skipped over the voyages to the moon, the swashbucklers, even the fucking classical shit, didn’t you, and for what? That German prick?”

Tommy ignored him.

“_Beyond_ fucking _Good and Evil_, hmm. Suppose it suits you, will to power and all that. Godless as you are Herr Nietzsche is right up your alley, ain’t he, Tom.”

That got him an arch of one brow and a reach for the notebook. Alfie frowned. Guess he should have expected it, but he was still somehow thrown by this lapse into telegram.

> Taken from your fucking collection.

“Yeah, alright, fuck off,” he muttered, and turned back to his own book. “Just saying, if it’s answers to the problem of good and evil you’re looking for, your time’s better spent with Agatha here than that overblown cunt. Fucking unreadable, mate.”

Brow still elevated, Tommy turned back to his book.

Despite the previous drama, after Marie fed them supper they settled into what Alfie had to admit was a pleasant enough evening. Accompanied by the radio’s tunes as had become habit, Alfie with his mystery novel and Tommy giving the Bosch a rest, instead thumbing through Margate’s excuse for a newspaper, the _Isle of Thanet Gazette_.

The snap of a match catching flame drew his eyes to his houseguest and his thoughts back to Marie’s earlier question. Fucking nonsense about _obligation_, about what he’d taken on. Taken on? The men under his command, that’d been an obligation, right. The men he’d paid to run his tracks and distill his rum, that was a similar sort of undertaking. He’d taken on the obligations of expanding his business after the war, proudly, yeah, he’d made a go of it and done well by his men. Made sure they were set before he’d retired, made sure they had enough to get on until they found something else. Only fair. Those were proper obligations, right. Obligations to his own people.

Tommy Shelby weren’t one of his people. He didn’t know what this fucking was, didn’t have a name for it, this little interlude, but it weren’t about obligation. Didn’t fucking owe Tommy Shelby shit. Didn’t even owe the man an explanation for nothing, did he, though it seemed no matter what he told himself explanations eventually rushed out of him like air from a leaky tyre whenever Tommy was involved. To his eternal fucking irritation.

It was just that Tommy had this tendency to run smack into a line of machine gun fire and come out the other side riddled with holes but still standing, his domain inexplicably advanced, and Alfie’d be lying if he tried to claim that hadn’t been something of a diversion over the years, watching him pull it off. And now, well. Maybe Mosley’d been a yard too far. No matter how it seemed tonight -- cozy in his sitting room, the shelling distant enough to be mere echoes of a shockwave, the kind you weren’t sure was just in your head -- they was still in the middle of the battle. This was just a lull in the fighting, huddled behind the lines, and he wanted to see how it ended.

Even surrounded with people as Alfie’d nearly always been -- whether in school as a boy or the shop before the war or in the barracks and the trenches during or in the distillery after -- he’d seldom had real camaraderie, companionship, fucking fellowship, whatever you wanted to call it. Set apart somehow, worse after France, and yeah, he’d played that up, made use of it. Course he had. You made use of whatever was at your disposal in this life, didn’t you. He’d seen it in Tommy the first time he’d walked into his shop, a nobody from nowhere, on his own and beat to hell and ignoring it. Strolling in as if he already owned the place, at ease offering aid to a man with Alfie’s reputation despite still wincing from the ribs that had obviously just got smashed in by Alfie’s fucking competitor.

That thing that separated Alfie from other men, even from Sabini, who he’d squabbled with since their school days -- Tommy had it. The knowledge that you’d sent men to their deaths and then gone on about your business because there was no other choice if you didn’t want to join them. The knowledge that you’d do it again even after you got free of the mud, because now you knew you could survive it. War broke all men but some it broke more cleverly than others, in ways that let it perpetuate itself instead of burning out. He and Tommy, well, maybe they’d cracked along similar lines, was all. Suppose that made them comrades of a sort. And hospitality, now that was something a man freely offered to his comrades, wasn’t it.

Across the room Tommy tilted his head back a little, blowing smoke at the ceiling. The newspaper crinkled as he paused in his reading to tap the ash off the end of his cigarette. Weren’t much in the way of actual news in the rag he was reading; local gossip mostly, not like the doings in London or even Birmingham, Alfie supposed. Though he’d never had the misfortune of attempting to digest the _Birmingham Daily Mail_ \-- those times he’d wanted to monitor the general goings-on up north he’d set Ollie on the task -- he could admit it most likely represented a far busier and more newsworthy population than Margate.

The sedate little string number that’d been playing faded in favor of the weather, and that was Alfie’s signal to give the radio a rest for the night. He set aside ol’Agatha and gathered himself to stand, only to find Tommy frowning at him over top the _Gazette_.

“Yeah, what is it, mate? There a new amusement at Dreamland? Or did some bloke lose a passel of chickens to the local den of foxes? Fucking what?”

“Leave it on.” It was the first thing he’d said aloud since the deluge.

“Nah,” Alfie said. “Tired of the racket.”

Tommy’s chin lifted till he was staring at Alfie down his nose. If it hadn’t been for the butchered barbering, he’d have resembled a professor on sabbatical, slumming it. “Leave it fucking on.”

Bloody hell. Well, chances were nothing much would happen, right? Weren’t like every day was packed full of news specifically crafted to set off this one man, was it. The first time might’ve just been chance, you know, bad fucking luck. And even then it weren’t like Tommy’d done much more than sit there and shake.

Alfie stared back at him a beat. “Ordered around in my own fucking house, yeah, alright Thomas. I see how it is.” Then he settled into the cushions again and left the radio alone to do its worst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think the only specific warnings in this one are mentions of suicidal ideation.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is well and safe.

As the announcer finished off the weather report -- cold and drying out for the near term, Tommy’d be pleased he could resume his sandy wanderings -- the man himself lit up a cigarette, yet another future addition to the ever-expanding collection of stubbed-out butts in his ashtray. While Alfie’d surely welcomed the change to his stale routine brought by another human presence besides his nurse, he’d yet to quite adjust to the ever-present haze of smoke that accompanied it. Smoking had been off-limits to the men in the distillery for obvious fucking flammable reasons, right, and while yeah he might enjoy the occasional pipe himself, it was just that -- an _occasional_ pleasure. In France cigarettes had been the ubiquitous currency of bonding between men, a tool to settle shaking hands, but that’d been fucking outdoors, hadn’t it. For Tommy it seemed more of a compulsion beyond even the need for nicotine, a fact that had somehow escaped Alfie’s previous evaluation of the man. He’d known Tommy was a dedicated smoker; he just hadn’t realized how continuous a habit it was, unless this too was a recent change. He didn’t think so.

The newspaper fluttered a bit as Tommy turned a page, cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. When the announcer’s posh voice moved on to the news, his gaze settled somewhere in the middle distance, no longer tracing the smudged black print in front of him.

“His government voted down over the taxation of married women sharing a business with their husbands,” the newsman declared, “André Tardieu resigned today as Prime Minister of France.”

Hmm. Seemed a silly thing to dispose of a prime minister over. As the announcer detailed the inevitable consequences of renewed turmoil in Europe, Alfie considered making use of his own pipe. Decided against it, wanting to avoid spilling embers on himself or the couch or the carpet should the need arise to set it aside with haste. Something more about American tariffs and the continuation of Prohibition, which Alfie only idly followed given he no longer had a stake in the matter. Then--

“At a vigorous speech before a packed crowd in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, Sir Oswald Mosley promoted his newly minted Memorandum, in which he laid out a bold strategy to ameliorate the entrenched scourge of joblessness in Britain.”

Tommy’s knuckles were white where he gripped his neglected paper. Jaw working, he very deliberately folded the thing and reached over to extinguish his barely-smoked cigarette in the brimming ashtray.

“After formally resigning from the Labour Party at the New Year and announcing the formation of the British Union of Fascists, Mosley presented his eponymous Memorandum in Parliament at the start of the session, to praise and controversy both.”

Tommy stood abruptly, the paper spilling to the floor at his feet, then plucked the frames of his spectacles off and slid them into their case and into his trouser pocket. Produced the packet of cigarettes from the other pocket and tapped out a fresh specimen, rolling it against his bottom lip. The first match snapped in half when he struck it against the box.

Fuck. All that scawling about January, about something starting in the new year, the way he’d reacted to learning time had slid past him like a car on an icy road right into February while he’d been drugged senseless in Bedlam -- Tommy’d known this was going to happen, known what Mosley had planned.

“As unemployment surges towards the one million mark, last month’s rally of the stock market continues to hold steady. Though still well below the pre-crash peak, Wall Street closed at a comparatively respectable 265. The disparity between the two numbers proves, Mr. Mosley insists, that what recovery we’ve seen has been limited to the interests of the business class and its foreign investors, by design cutting out the working man.”

Tommy got his cigarette lit on the second fucking try. His attention pinned Alfie then, a pensive frown crawling over him at whatever he’d read from Alfie’s obvious surveillance. He bent and retrieved the paper, ember glowing between two fingers. Folded it in half and half again and set it on the arm of his chair. Oblivious to all of this, of course, the announcer droned on.

“And on the lighter side, today at the International Air Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, Elm Farm Ollie, dairy cow extraordinaire, became the first of her species to take flight. Not to be outdone by Ollie in record-setting, Mr. Elsworth W. Bunce of Wisconsin won the title of first man to milk a cow mid-air. Miss Ollie's milk was then parachuted to spectators below, including star aviator Charles Lindbergh himself.” A faint forlorn moo sounded in the background of the broadcast. “Perhaps in years to come your milkman will have a whole new route, ladies, and you’ll look to the skies for your daily delivery.”

A mad burst of laughter escaped Alfie before he could quite contain it, and whether it was due to the absurdity of that particular dispatch or the sheer incredulity that had overtaken Tommy’s face was hard to say.

“Jesus Christ,” Tommy muttered, passing a hand over his eyes, pressing into the sockets as the news came to a close.

“Yeah.” Alfie lit his pipe, still hitching a little with the urge to hysterics. “Yeah, mate. Well said.”

Alfie slept fitfully that night, woken first by the blankets conspiring to smother him and then by a wave of pins and needles attacking his feet, like he was being stabbed by a thousand angry insects, each wielding a tiny bayonet. This second unpleasant awakening was accompanied by the creaky whine of the floorboards in the guest room, and when he sat up, Alfie caught snatches of words, the brittle edge to them not much dulled by the walls. So Tommy was awake as well, or had never bothered with sleep to start with. Not that it was much of a surprise at this point.

“I don’t know, I don’t fucking know. Arthur said… Arthur said you were gone but I didn’t see it happen…” The voice faded in and out as Tommy paced, coming clearer and then drifting off. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense... they went after everyone but Johnny and me and I don’t fucking know why. Doesn’t make sense.”

Wasn’t unexpected, that Tommy’d speak to one of his ghosts tonight, not after the revelations that’d come to them over the radio. But just as soon as Alfie tuned in the voice ceased and he eventually drifted off to the faint rhythm of Tommy’s tread.

Sometime later, hours maybe, the night still pitch-dark around him, Alfie roused again for no reason he could place. He blinked groggily at the nothingness and became aware of his heart coming down from a quick march, whatever he’d dreamt slipping away before he could grasp it. Wood groaned and settled faintly from the other room where Tommy was still up, still fucking traipsing his short circuit like a dog on a chain. He’d gone hoarse, must’ve been talking half the fucking night, right, of course he was fucking hoarse.

“She won’t… she doesn’t want to hear anything more from me. I told you, Pol has her own strategies, you would have found out if you’d fucking married her. She’ll look after her son’s interests over anything else. By now he’s made his bloody move, sat himself on the throne with her at his side.”

Tommy and his fucking throne. Begged the question again, how much he knew about his cousin’s little corporate revolution. Seemed he’d at least anticipated it, didn’t it.

The tight prowl round the room had stopped and there was silence for a long while. Alfie scrubbed at his face wearily as the first faint hints of grey crept into the night. Must be near four, getting ready for dawn. There was a muffled clunk from beyond the wall and Tommy’s voice, when it came again, was scraped raw.

“No. Fucking no. You said they came from behind. Why would… Why would he give us up? You beat him to hell, but there must’ve been a better fucking reason than that. He was to get thirty-thousand pounds out of the deal like the rest of you, why would he--” Desperate. He sounded desperate now, arguing with his ghost like it was saying something he didn’t want to hear. There was another thunk and Alfie wondered if he was kicking the fucking wall; but the wall could take it, so he let it go. Who the fuck was he talking to this time? Whoever it was, this was the most agitated he’d gotten during his nighttime conversations. “No. Just fucking-- fucking stop. I’ve known him since-- I’ve known him a hell of a lot longer than I knew you.”

The silence that followed drew out long enough Alfie could hear the ticking of the little clock on his bedside table, but it was a keyed up, throttled kind of quiet, like a clenched fist. He’d settled back into the blankets and shut his eyes, waiting for sleep to take him again for the last few hours left to night, when the wall let pass a hardly-recognizable croak, as if ghostly hands had strangled Tommy during that silence and left him for dead.

“They said… they said you, the rest of ‘em...” A pause, then the ragged voice limped on. “They said it’s just-- just me mind’s way of having a chat with its own ruminations.”

Alfie thought that might have been it, then, at last, the way it’d petered out there at the end. Sounded final anyway. Sounded… hmm. This _they_ who’d advised him being the doctors at Bedlam, maybe, or his family, or both. Didn’t much sound like Tommy believed it. If he was _seeing _his ghosts, which had seemed the case during the paralyzing visitations from his dead wife, Alfie couldn’t say he would have blamed him. Hadn’t happened very often but those few times he’d seen a shell explode inside the distillery or while walking along the High Street it had certainly felt fucking real. Real enough to hit the ground and then feel foolish about it afterwards. And then there was the aunt, who Ada Thorne believed could communicate with the dead.

Yeah, he’d thought it was over, that maybe Tommy’d finally turned in. So when the crash of breaking glass came, it jolted him out of his bed and into the hallway before he’d quite gathered he’d made a decision about the matter.

“Fuck off.” Tommy, again, grinding out the words like gravel under tyres, under marching boots. “Fuck off and take your fucking bullshit with you.”

“Thomas.” Alfie’s rap on the guest room door went ignored. “Tommy, open the fucking door.”

Nothing.

He stood there, in his wrinkled flannel pajama pants and undershirt and bare feet, and waited for an answer that wasn’t going to come. So he had a decision to make, yeah. Go back to bed and hope for the best, or try the door and see if it was locked. And if it was locked, well, then that was another decision, wasn’t it.

He thought of the sliver of glass Tommy’d slipped into his pocket after breaking the mirror in the sitting room.

The knob turned in his hand.

When he pushed the door open it took his eye a moment to adjust, but gradually it began to find shapes, guided by the encroaching light of dawn glowing through the windows where Tommy hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains. He pushed the door further and felt it catch on something, crunching a little against the floor. Looked down at a splash of water on the floorboards and the scattered shards of glass, remembered the pitcher of water Marie’d left on the bedside table, after the fever.

“Flooding my fucking floors again, this is something of a pattern with you today, eh, Tom? Thought the runoff from the rain would be it, but now you’re adding glassware to the mix, hmm?”

There was a slight shift in the dimness across the room, the only reason Alfie placed him. Tommy was sitting on the far side of the neatly made bed, facing the wall, his back to the door. Alfie couldn’t tell if he’d even heard the door open. Felt like he was intruding, which he was, but only if you ignored this was his fucking house. The silence drew him further in the room, leery of the glass that was near invisible in the dark. The nerves in his feet weren’t all that reliable anymore; if he trod on anything sharp he’d probably learn of the wound by slipping on his own blood trail. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Rounding the end of the bed, he came to a stop in front of Tommy and waited for him to react. There was enough light now to make out his face, hovering phantom-pale above the white of his rumpled undershirt, still tucked into his fucking trousers, still double striped by his braces like train tracks. In the dimness, Tommy’s eyes were black. Black and uninhabited.

“Tommy.”

Nothing. Fuck. He’d… he’d seemed fine enough by the end of the news. Had a little trouble with his matches but hadn’t panicked like that first night. After the shit with the cow they’d listened to the broadcast a little longer, took in some pompous marching band, then both gone off to bed like nothing had happened.

Tommy’s hands were resting loosely in his lap and in one of them, cupped like some sacred fucking artifact, was a curved piece of blown glass about as thick as Alfie’s thumb that had made up the handle of the water pitcher. And stuck at one end a jagged fragment of the pitcher itself, like the short blade of an awkwardly made dagger. Something you could close your hand around and still make good use of without slicing yourself up too badly in the process.

“Hmm. What’ve you got there, Tommy?” Alfie asked, quietly. Tommy blinked finally, blinked and swallowed around nothing, then as if on some kind of delay, his head tilted down to look at his hands. “You got plans for that?”

Tommy’s throat worked again. “Yeah,” he breathed out, and the detached note made the short hair on the back of Alfie’s neck stand to attention as Tommy’s hand curled a little more around the glass.

“Alright. You mind if I clean up the rest before one of us -- most likely myself since your shoes are still fucking on -- adds blood to the mix wrecking my floor?”

A faint sort of confusion passed over Tommy’s face and drifted off again. He shook his head. Back to no and yeah, innit. Well, he supposed now he had to follow through. Alfie left the door open and retrieved a towel and a broom and dustpan and made quick work of the mess. By time he was done, Tommy’d turned his head enough to gaze out the window at the growing light of dawn and the hunk of glass weren’t in his hand anymore, so whatever he intended to do with it didn’t appear imminent. Or he was waiting for Alfie to leave.

Alfie paused, the full dustpan in his hand. “So, y’think that fucking cow’s still up there, you know, circling around, udder to the wind?”

Tommy blinked again, something flooding back into his face, something threadbare yet still dialing Alfie’s instinct for trouble down to a low simmer. He rose from the bed and turned to face Alfie by the door, hands loose at his sides. “Goodnight, Alfie.”

“Yeah, right, what’s left of it.” He knew a polite request to fuck off when he heard it, didn’t he. “You get in the mood to toss more of my breakables at your wall, you know, maybe leave off filling them with water next time, hmm? Less likely to ruin the finish on the fucking floor.”

With that he turned and departed, and Tommy shut the door after him.

When he stumbled out for breakfast a couple hours later, Tommy’s door stood open, the room empty and spotless. Tommy himself was in the sitting room buried in _Beyond Good and Evil_ again, sound and whole as far as Alfie could tell, as if last night hadn’t happened. Didn’t even look particularly tired, did he, or not any more than usual. A beam of sunlight fell over him where he sat, glinting off the blue of his eyes like beach glass in sand. While Alfie watched, he turned a page, a line deepening between his brows as if he’d found whatever he was reading perturbing. Or he knew Alfie was staring at him. So he turned and left him to it.

“Fucking hell,” Alfie muttered to Marie as she poured him a cup of tea in the kitchen.

“Rough night, Mr. Solomons?” She raised a brow at him, like she knew exactly what kind of night it’d been.

“Hrm.” Alfie took a gulp of tea. This was this kind of morning that might require coffee, wasn’t it, maybe even that concentrated shit Sabini liked to foist on the unsuspecting and unitalian. “He acknowledge your existence yet?”

Marie shrugged. “Asked me if there was a library in town.”

“Out loud or with fucking paper?”

“Does it matter?” Marie took a sip of her own tea. For the first time since this all started she looked a bit worn herself, Marie. Maybe Tommy’d kept her up last night as well. If he had she didn’t seem to have anything to say about it and she’d seen fit to keep herself uninvolved, for which he couldn’t fault her.

Marie made him his eggs and Alfie made them both some coffee and then they sat together awhile in companionable silence while Alfie’s brain woke up enough to face whatever the fuck Tommy wanted a library for. Not that he couldn’t guess.

“I don’t have enough of the fucking things here, you need to take a trip to the book mausoleum?”

Tommy didn’t look up from his Nietzsche, and about the time Alfie’d decided he was being ignored again, this time for interrupting whatever had happened last night, he spoke. “Newspapers.” As if that explained anything.

“Newspapers,” Alfie repeated. “I got newspapers if you want ‘em, mate, plenty of fucking newspapers, they come every fucking night and pile up before I can finish reading them, don’t they, there’s probably a heap of ‘em in the kitchen waiting to be used to light--”

That, that was a sigh. An irritated sigh, for fuck’s sake, like Alfie was trying his fucking patience, like explaining was below him. “A library will have back issues.”

Right. “Just what do you need those mouldering things for, anyhow?”

Tommy shifted, staring at him through his posh spectacles. Hmm. Not in the mood to humor obvious questions, was he.

“You going today?”

“Yeah.” Tommy turned back to his book.

“You want company?”

He lifted an indifferent shoulder, which wasn’t a no.

“Last night,” Alfie started, sure this would end badly but pressing on. “That was about Mosley’s speech, yeah? The one that went to hell, I mean, few months back. You was talking to one of the poor fucks who died there, about who killed him.”

Tommy didn’t do anything so obvious as freeze, more took up his blue-ribbon impression of a statue again, failing to move in any significant way typical to a living creature.

“Told you not to ask too many questions of ‘em, mate.” Alfie said. “This something you’re sure you want an answer to?”

The sun had moved on, leaving Tommy’s eyes opaque, almost colorless. This time when he spoke his tone was empty, apathetic, at odds with his words, like it didn’t fucking matter who’d blown his entire plot to pieces and got a couple of his men killed and thrown Tommy himself into the state that had landed him in Bedlam. “His treasons will sit blushing in his face.”

Fucking Richard again. He seemed to fall back on the deposed king’s words whenever he felt the need to talk around the subject, to come at it indirectly. Or maybe it was his way of expressing what otherwise had left him mute. Betrayal could do that to a man, couldn’t it. Which meant whoever it was, it cut close.

“Yeah,” Alfie said. “Alright. You know who it is yet? Your black cat?”

But all he got for his effort was a stiff silence. Which wasn’t a no, was it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hilariously, the news bit about the cow actually happened, and on the day in time in which this story takes place. Sometimes research overkill turns up gems. I couldn't resist using it.
> 
> Mosley did give a speech in Manchester, but it was later in history and his Memorandum came before he formed the British Union of Fascists, but since the show has compressed history here, I'm moving things up too.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings specific to this chapter in endnotes

The public library in Margate weren’t a big place, but it was an exceedingly posh one by Alfie’s standards, all gleaming oak and marble. Smelled of money, didn’t it, money and pompousness. Someone had put up a generous chunk of cash furnishing the place out of civic duty or to purchase local influence or launder a bit of less-than-aboveboard income or all three at once. Made Alfie itch, how tidy and polished it all was. Made him want to clutter it up a bit, scatter some litter around, maybe. Let in a flock of seagulls to do their best. It’d been a miscalculation on his part, tagging along on this errand like a bored child. He could be home right now cleaning out his fucking pipe or organizing his office or irritating Marie.

Despite the fact that a decade before he would have been kicked out for suspected vagrancy just from the tilt of his cap, Tommy glided through the entryway like he owned the place and headed straight for the big desk at the front. Alfie himself hadn’t set foot in a library since he’d been chased out of one as a tot and given a right thrashing in the street. He trailed along in Tommy’s wake, the tap tap of his cane bouncing off all that sparkle. First due to inability and then a general disinterest, he’d only ventured into Margate proper a handful of times since his arrival, and it still felt like visiting a foreign country. Didn’t seem to be many in the way of his own people in Margate, that was for sure.

“‘Course you’d be at home in a shithole like this, mate,” he said, voice echoing off the walls, amplified as if he had a bullhorn. Nobody shushed him -- yet -- but the biddy browsing some stuffy leather-bound tome on a nearby table made her glare known. “Looks just like that castle you poured half your gold into, don’t it.” The one he seemed determined to avoid at the moment, and his wife and children with it. Not to mention poor Cyril.

Tommy’d come to a stop at the desk with its attendant, a lovely lad five years too young to have been in France, round-faced and rosy and neatly pressed. He took in Tommy with polite expectation while Tommy just stood there like he'd been switched off; and it struck Alfie belatedly that this was the first time he’d been anywhere that wasn’t Alfie’s house or the fucking beach since he’d abandoned his uncle’s boat after being smuggled out of Bedlam. For a long tight-rope of a minute, Alfie was afraid he was going to need to intervene and was doing the internal calculations as to how much it’d cost him with Tommy when he did, but then the young man glanced between them and asked how he could help and Tommy straightened, his shoulders squared, and cleared his throat.

“The London Times,” he said, still a little scratchy around the edges, from all the words he’d spent last night or from the strain of overcoming the impulse towards silence.

Whether it was Tommy’s general air of command or because he took his job that seriously, the lad behind the desk jumped to attention and led them to a quiet, sunny corner next to hanging racks of news. “The current week is on the rack. The current month in this cabinet. Anything before that I’ll have to bring out from storage. Any dates you’d like to start with?”

“January,” Tommy answered, sending him off with a nod of dismissal.

January, of course he’d asked for January, it was always January with Tommy these days, wasn’t it. The word was starting to take on the aura of some kind of ancient curse.

“That’s thirty-odd papers, you know, how long were you intending to spend--”

“You didn’t have to come.” Tommy opened the cabinet and poked through the piles of newsprint.

“Hrm.” Alfie plucked that day’s edition from the rack and settled into a nearby armchair, leaving Tommy to spread his horde over the polished wood table. “You didn’t say you meant to read every bit of news printed since the dawn of time, neither.”

“You didn’t ask.” Tommy pulled one of the stiff wooden chairs out and took a seat.

“Looking for something specific, then?” As if he didn’t know why they were here. But Tommy was already flipping through the first of his pile, scanning headlines, quickly moving on. Alfie gave in to his continuous need to prod. “You sure you don’t want December?”

“No,” Tommy said. “I don’t want December.” With that he lifted his current choice, spreading the pages like a barrier between them.

Alfie read every word of that day’s _Times_ and then yesterday’s as well. Found a children’s book someone had discarded on a nearby table and flipped through that, going along on an adventure with a grumpy grizzly bear seeking out honey before hibernation. Sounded good to him, didn’t it, curling up on some warm cave somewhere. At some point after that he got bored and took a stroll around the reading room, attracting more sour faces and at least one child who attempted to follow him like he was the Pied Piper until its mother swept it up and fled. Terrified another tyke to tears merely from its catching sight of his scarred visage and ghoulish eye, he supposed. Got a couple of stares from the adults as well and put on his best glower for effect, grumbling to himself under his breath. After he’d finished shaking up the locals, given them something to discuss over dinner, right, he made his way back to the table Tommy’d staked out, piled now with even more newspapers. Tommy’d taken off his cap and coat and was standing over the papers spread before him like they was maps on a camp table in the trenches, his little notebook within easy reach, ready to take notations.

“Did’you know, mate,” Alfie said, from the other side of the table. “They’ve found themselves a whole new planet out there, floating in the nothingness beyond the borders of our universe?”

Tommy didn’t look up.

“Yeah. Named it after the king of hell. Or, well, the underworld; suppose it’s not quite the same thing, is it, the Hades of the ancients and your people’s prison of eternal damnation. Appropriate, far out there as it is, removed from God’s light, right, or the sun’s light anyway; same thing, depending who you are. Pluto, god of wealth and hell both. Because pursuit of wealth, of course, leads one to hell eventually, don’t it. Find anything of use?”

Before Tommy could make up his mind whether he was going to bother to respond, the lad from the desk appeared with an apology already painted across his face with the freckles. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, we’ll be closing shortly.”

Tommy lifted his head, doggedly calm and evaluating the kid with the kind of speculation that meant he viewed the law you’d just laid down as the starting point to a fucking negotiation, one potentially backed with explosives. But nobody in Margate knew who the fuck either of them was, gangster or MP; and it weren’t likely he’d pull his lethal hunk of glass in a library -- or so Alfie hoped -- even if it would alleviate the boredom some to witness.

The lad must have sensed something brewing, because he lifted a placating hand. “We open again tomorrow morning at eight, if you’d like to return. I can pull these same papers for you again.”

Alfie fished out his pocket watch and found it was already a quarter of five. The cab had come for them at the house just after lunch; time had dragged, but it hadn’t seemed that long, had it.

“This… this memorandum.” Tommy tapped the paper he’d been reading, where Mosley’s name scrawled across the front page in large type. “Do you have a copy I can read? A full copy of the text?”

The lad’s friendly professionalism evaporated as he followed Tommy’s finger to the name. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” he said, gone rigid. He glanced between Alfie and Tommy, nervy but standing his ground. “It’s not the kind of thing we’d carry here.”

“This is a library,” Tommy bit off, incredulous. “It was published by a fucking member of Parliament. You don’t have a copy for public use?”

“Tommy,” Alfie broke into the tension, as the lad seemed to square himself for a fight he’d lose, badly and with haste, even if the glass weren’t involved. “Papers ain’t going nowhere, are they, and Marie’ll be expecting us for tea. Unless you have more vigorous plans for your evening?” Plans involving the local coppers, he didn’t add, and didn’t have to.

That earned him a scowl from Tommy and an awkward smile of relief from the attendant, who seemed to have taken in the specificities of Alfie’s attire and put two and two together when it came to the likelihood of his affiliation with fascists. Alfie put odds at sixty-forty Tommy’d just return after dark and break the fuck in, but for the moment he folded the paper he’d been studying and stomped off.

Alfie dug in his pocket and pulled out a shilling. “For your kind assistance, right,” he said, handing it to the lad, who accepted it with an air of utter confusion.

“Oh, sir, you don’t have to--”

“Keep it, mate, I’ve got to hunt down my friend there before he makes any more trouble for someone who’s on his fucking side.”

But Tommy was only waiting by the entrance, hands thrust in his coat pockets, cap back on his head, something between bemusement and annoyance in his stance. “You tipped the librarian.”

“Picked the pocket of the last one I met,” Alfie said, “so it only seems fair.”

It was still bright outside at five o’clock, which was something of a novelty and made the hunt for a cab a bit simpler to navigate, at least in theory, yeah, if not in practice. They stood on the corner outside the library and watched a good seven cars pass by, then a couple lorries, but nothing in the way of taxis. Fucking Margate, right, and the off-season to boot; in London he’d be home by now, wouldn’t he. Alfie considered how long it’d take for them to walk back. Figured Tommy’d make it easy enough, all the hiking he did along the shore, though his own survival of such a journey was doubtful.

“So, you learn anything, then, from all those fucking papers?”

It weren’t that cold yet, just a little nip to the wind, but Tommy shrugged deeper into his coat and took the opportunity to light up. “There’s a new bloody planet,” he mumbled around his cigarette.

That called for a roll of the eyes, didn’t it, but before Alfie could get very far with it Tommy’d flagged down a black cab. Held the door open while Alfie got himself inside best he could, which was a groaning and laborious process, right, then neatly slid in after him as Alfie gave the driver his address.

“He’s recruited more Labour MPs to his cause,” Tommy said once the taxi had pulled away from the curb. Even and dry and disinterested, as if he was making a report to his board. Tapped his ash into the ashtray embedded in the seat in front of them and took another draw. “Made a few more speeches after he announced his new party, all of ‘em well attended, and he’s got the Billy Boys roughing up anyone who protests. Suffragettes are with him, that’s a development. The ones who aren’t Communists anyhow, though that’ll change.”

“Fucking suffragettes?” Alfie whistled. “Smart. He make a direct appeal to ‘em?”

Tommy’s left hand rubbed at his thigh. He’d turned away towards his window, watching the streets of Margate blur but seeing something else. Cleared his throat. “I told her, it’s apples and apples. Only a matter of time before her people are his.”

Whose people? Before he could ask, Tommy droned on, gone a bit cutting. “‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ -- that’s from the _Daily Mail. _He’s making inroads with the papers, then, or with the owners at least.”

Fucking hell. Fucking--

“Oh, and he fingered me as his deputy.” He was staring straight ahead into nothing now, face a little slack as if he weren’t the one speaking, as if he was hearing his own thoughts coming from some other mouth. “Says I’ll announce after my return from holiday.”

The cab had left the main chunk of downtown behind, the buildings less packed together, more residential, surrounded by neat yards with little white fences and decorative shrubbery. Margate was pleasant enough, Alfie could admit that much. He’d picked it for a reason, after all. Just hadn’t figured he’d still be here, three years later, had he. His retirement was meant to have been a short one.

“All those fuckers cheering him on,” Tommy muttered, scanning the distance beyond the cab as if searching a crowd. “All those faces.”

Alfie glanced up to catch the driver watching them in the rearview mirror. “Tommy--”

“Civil fucking wounds.” Pulling at his collar, he went stark white, like a man about to be sick. “Civil wounds plough’d up with neighbours' sword. Nothing but, nothing but blood and scorched earth and the dead, the dead--”

Alfie could hear him breathing now, panting a little between chunks of words, mouth open, eyes hollowed out with horror. The cabbie was shifting in his seat and Tommy was coming apart next to him and this whole trip had been a bad idea, right, he should have known better. Should have fucking known--

“--the dead crushed under tanks stacked rotting in the field rotting next to the BSA and the chip shop and the Garrison and Charlie’s Yard.” Tommy turned to him then, the whites of his eyes showing, voice strangled. He lashed out, forearm slamming into the panel of the door next to him, a wolf snapping at his cage. “You talk about fucking Pluto, eh, about planets out there named for hell when hell is coming for us right here in Britain, it’s coming and it doesn’t-- fucking--”

Tyres squealing, the cab jerked to a stop at the side of the road and Tommy flinched hard, nearly ducking, like there’d been a gunshot or a shellburst.

“Get out of my bloody cab, both of you,” the cabbie bellowed, wide-eyed.

“It’s five more fucking blocks, mate,” Alfie barked, attention bouncing between the man and Tommy, whose mouth was moving silently, like he was counting to himself.

“Get him fucking out.” The man had thrown his own door open and then Tommy’s, was making to drag Tommy out himself, but Tommy’d pulled his makeshift fucking dagger. The cabbie reeled back. “Jesus Christ!”

Moving faster than he’d managed for at least half a decade, Alfie’d got himself out of the cab and around to Tommy’s door before he knew what he was doing, putting himself between Tommy and the cabbie.

“Back off,” he ordered the man, hefting his cane in one hand like a club.

“You stealing my fucking cab?” the man shrieked, as if he got hijacked by broken glass and cane wielding bandits every fucking day.

“No, we’re not fucking stealing--” Giving up, Alfie stooped into the open door and grabbed hold of the scruff of Tommy’s neck like he’d handle a pup. “Tommy. Tom. Listen, put that thing away, yeah?”

“You bring a fucking lunatic into my cab and--”

Keeping his grip on Tommy, Alfie turned a snarl over his shoulder. “You know what this fucking is, right, don’t tell me you weren’t fucking there. You know. Back off and give us some fucking space.”

The man raised his hands, grumbling, and retreated a good yard away. Tommy’s fist was still clenched around the pitcher handle but he was shaking now like someone’d tossed him into freezing water and left him there.

“Tom. Tell me where you are.”

“The sc-screaming...” He swallowed, blinking erratically, squeezing his eyes shut. “Alfie--”

Well, that was something. “You’re in Margate, right, sun and sea and lots of fucking sand, you’re on holiday, you know, so you don’t need that thing, do you. Mind if I hold it for awhile?”

Tommy loosened his grip and let Alfie take the piece of glass from him. His teeth were chattering. “I need-- n-need a f-fucking drink.”

“Yeah, okay.” Alfie pocketed the glass and turned back to the cabbie. “Oi! You got a flask on you? A bottle in the cab?”

The man stared at him like he’d asked for a pink elephant, then reached into his jacket pocket. “Christ. Just take it and get out of my bloody car.”

“Working on it,” Alfie glared, and caught the flask the cabbie tossed his way. He unscrewed the cap and tried to wrap Tommy’s hands around it but they were shaking too hard to grasp anything, like an old man with a palsy. “Right, yeah, change of plan.” He put the flask to Tommy’s lips and tipped it until he felt him take a gulp, then pulled it away, crouching down best he could to get in Tommy’s eye line. “Tell me where you are, mate.”

There was a noisy, air-starved edge to his gasps as he shook his head. “Dunno. In a car. In a c-cab.”

“Yeah, you’re in a cab. Can you hold this yet?” Tommy took the flask from him and managed to keep it this time, taking another slug. Made a face, like whatever he was tasting was vile. “Used to that top shelf shit these days, ain’t ya, stuff made for the bosses. So you’re in a cab. What city are you in.”

“The-- the library,” Tommy said. Which, yeah, getting closer, and at least it was a location they’d been to today instead of wherever the fuck it was he’d gone a minute ago, where there was screaming. Whether that’d been the crowd at Bingley Hall the night of Mosley’s speech or the fucking Somme, Alfie supposed it didn’t matter much. Seemed clear the two were linked for him, didn’t it.

“Margate,” Alfie repeated. “You’re in Margate, yeah? And this kind gentleman, who has offered up libations to you, would like us to vacate his fucking cab in return. What city are you in, Tom.”

Tommy shook his head, took another shot from the flask. “Can’t-- can’t fucking stand.”

He didn’t seem to know where the fuck he was yet even with Alfie telling him, but he was more collected than Alfie probably had any right to expect at this point if he was able to make that call. Alfie faced the cabbie, digging in his pocket for his wallet.

“I got ten fucking pounds here, mate, in advance, if you’ll just take us to our original fucking destination, yeah?”

“Jesus Christ,” the man said, taking his Lord’s name in vain for what had to be the fifth fucking time, and took the bill from him. “Control your friend, yeah?”

“He’s fine.” Tommy had his head back against the seat and was staring at the ceiling of the cab. The shakes had wound down to shivers and he was starting to breath normally, but his colour was pasty and Alfie could still hear the faint clicking of his teeth rattling together, even with his jaw clenched shut. Alfie bent over him again, giving the side of his face a quick pat when he didn’t respond to his name at first. He was cold to the touch. “Right. What fucking city we in, Tommy?”

“Margate.” His eyes closed. “Have you decided to live in a fucking cab now?”

“Well,” Alfie said. “That’s up to this bloke, innit.”

“Yeah, fucking fine.” The cabbie was already climbing back behind the wheel. “You getting in or what?”

What Alfie wanted to do was break all the fucker’s teeth. What he did instead was shut Tommy’s door and cross back to his own side of the cab and settle himself into his seat again. “There’s ten more for you if you can hold your tongue the rest of the trip, and if you can’t do that, mate, I don’t guarentee you’ll keep the fucking thing beyond it.”

“Christ,” Marie said when she met them at the door.

Beyond them, on the street, the cabbie was chewing them out with all the colour and volume at his disposal, despite the absurd profit he'd made from a trip couldn’t be worth more than a couple shillings. He’d waited, of course, until they were well clear of his cab to open the floodgates, making good use of the tongue that against his better judgment Alfie’d stopped himself from taking with him as a souvenir.

“Everybody keeps saying that. S’like I’m in a fucking church.” Tommy’s enunciation had gone a little slippery after he’d drained the last of whatever the cabbie’d had in his flask, his accent thickening. Still completely articulate, of course, because even after two months off the stuff he had a lifetime of practice at it.

Marie, though, Marie was practiced too. Marie had an eagle-eye, didn’t she. She turned to Alfie, who was still leaning on his cane on the stoop and wishing everybody would just get out the way so he could collapse somewhere inside and expire. “Is he drunk?”

“Went into shock in the cab,” he summed up, “only thing on hand.”

“Hmm.” Marie said and stood aside so they could pass, eyeing Tommy worriedly as he did.

“Fucking foul,” Tommy editorialized. If you didn’t know him at all you mightn’t have guessed it, but he was profoundly soused. Something about how his shoulders had loosened, like the gears that usually wound him tight had slipped a few notches. It was less that he seemed relaxed than that this new state highlighted just how un-relaxed he typically was.

“S’not a good idea on top of the tablets,” was all Marie had to say. “How much did he have?”

“A cabbie’s flask-worth.” Alfie stumbled a little, as if he was the one who’d downed the spirits. Marie caught his arm and helped him into the sitting room to his couch. “Fucking hell.”

“You alright?” Tommy’d followed them, having lost his cap and coat somewhere along the way. Maybe even to the closet, Alfie hadn’t been keeping track, too busy trying to stay vertical. As he spoke he stripped off his jacket and tie, leaving him in shirtsleeves and open collar, flushed now where he’d been greyish, the booze lending him color.

“Am _I _alright.” Alfie sunk into the cushions with a bit-off groan and waved Marie away. “Never been better, yeah, feel twenty years old again.” A spasm ran through his back down into his leg, and he rode it with gritted teeth.

Tommy leaned a shoulder against the balcony door, putting a match to a fresh cigarette with steady hands. Behind him, the sun had slipped nearly beneath the sea. “Fucker asked me about it. At my wife’s bloody birthday party.”

Alfie glanced around the room, looking for the missing first half of the conversation. Weren’t his Lord, but he was about ready to take the name in vain himself, after the day he’d had, just for the vicariously blasphemous pleasure of it. “Who asked you about what?”

Tommy used his cigarette to point vaguely in the direction of the table by his usual armchair. “Nietzsche. Knew I wouldn’t know the name.”

Nietzsche was a who, but a dead one. So far Tommy hadn’t appeared to chat with the ghosts of any mad German philosophers, so it was likely he meant the fucking book. _Beyond Good and Evil_. “Well that’s the _what_, mate, now as for the who--”

“Mosley. Fucking Mosley. Wanted to make a point.”

Right, of course, who else. “And what point would that be?”

“That he’s a fucking baronet and I was born on a narrowboat.”

“Hmm. What about Freddy’s bit with the abyss, you know, that it will gaze into thee_._ Was that the point ol’Oswald might’ve wanted to make, that he knew what you was fucking up to when you joined him, and was rubbing your nose in it?”

“Maybe,” Tommy said. “Or maybe it was a gift, whatever his intention. Maybe I’ve learnt something, learnt the point is _one is punished best for one's virtues_.”

“Hmm. And which virtues are those, mate?”

“The kind that come with a razor,” Tommy said. “To slit his fucking throat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for panic attack and drinking to self medicate.
> 
> Pluto really was discovered on this day in history, though its naming and the announcement of the discovery happened a few months later.
> 
> "Hurrah for the blackshirts" was an actual headline, though again later in history.
> 
> This is the last chapter I have written. Given recent events I've had a hard time concentrating so I don't know when it will be continued or finished, thank you everyone who has read and enjoyed it.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terribly sorry for the long delay between chapters! Hope it won't be that long before the next one.

Silence seemed the only answer to that little declaration, right, a dead man’s fucking silence, but living or dead, silence weren’t one of Alfie’s virtues, now was it. So it didn’t last long, his answering silence. He listened to the hands of the clock go tick tick tick while the words built up in him like a rush of bodies going over the top, had to come up or get trampled from behind.

“Slit his fucking throat, yeah?” Alfie leaned forward on his couch, elbows on knees, hands clasped so they couldn’t throw nothing breakable like they itched to. Narrowed his eyes at the would-be assassin, as if that might make the situation less absurd. “What’re you gonna do, hmm, knife the bloke in the halls of Parliament? ‘Cause you’ll do the job yourself this time, won’t you, no trusting the plan to any more Judases.”

Tommy gave him one of them slow blinks, like a lizard sunning itself on a rock. Like all those words Alfie’d said weren’t nothing could reach him.

“I’ll do what has to be done,” he said, “even if it’s on the floor of the fucking House.”

“So what then, when his blood is soaking the soles of your posh shoes, right, on the floor of the Honourable Commons assembled, in front of all those fucking toffs. What next?” His words had found themselves a good solid marching rhythm now and he let them loose, heading straight for the tangle of wire on the other side of no man’s land. “What happens when the coppers find you, razor in hand? No last-second pardons for sticking a fucking MP, are there, no matter what you’ve got stashed away this time to blackmail the King.”

Tommy took a mouthful of smoke and released it again before he spoke. “Won’t matter, as long as he’s dead.”

Good thing neither of them had a revolver handy, ‘cause Alfie’s trigger finger cramped, his gun hand tightening in a fist, nails digging into his palm as he barreled on. “And even if you get away with it -- which you won’t -- you said, yeah, you sat right there in my sitting room and told me--” He was on his feet, didn’t remember telling his body to do anything of the sort, trigger finger jabbing the air at Tommy like it could fire bullets. “First you’d kill the man and then you’d kill his message. He’s set something in motion, your little baronet, hasn’t he. It’s alive, right, alive and hungry now, but you can’t slit its fucking throat. Won’t die so easily, this beast. At least Samson brought the whole fucking thing down with him, didn’t leave nothing uncaged and free to swallow the rest of us for its supper.”

Tommy shoved off the balcony door, flicking the butt of his cigarette away to fizzle out on the bare wood floor. The coolly blinking reptile was gone, overtaken by some other animal, feral and snarling.

“Yeah? And what about you, eh? You read the fucking papers. You know what’s happening.” 

Arms spread out like a vulture’s wings, all at once Tommy was within slashing distance, had he a razor on him. Which he didn’t, because Marie’d only bought him the safety type to shave with, and Alfie still had the glass dagger in his own pocket. Unless Tommy’d stashed away some other weapon like the paranoid fuck he was. 

“But now,” Tommy spit, “now you have _opinions_ about how things should be done. Easy to be a god, isn’t it, god of sitting in your fucking beach house, listening to your piano jingles and watching the ships go by. Don’t have to concern yourself with what happens to anyone else, sitting here in judgment while Mosley builds a bloody army of blackshirts. What do you care how it’s done, when you haven’t lifted a hand to do more than shoot at the fucking gulls?” 

Any words Alfie had to spare were choked off, a cur yanked back by a chain. 

“Not dead yet, not dead at all, but rotting, aren’t you? Rotting away here in the tomb you’ve bought for yourself, like some kind of pharaoh--”

“Don’t you fucking compare me, right, compare me to a fucking Egyptian--”

“Rotting from fucking boredom, eh, crown rusted through. Turns out you’re just like the rest of ‘em, the men they cast in bronze in the city square. Miles from the front but wanting a fucking say in how the killing’s done, as long as you don’t get any blood on you.” 

By now he was winded, Tommy, whether from rage or because it was the most he’d spoken in one go since they tossed him into Bedlam. Alfie let him pant, the remains of his own fit of temper swirling a drain in his belly. Took too much energy to keep up long, didn’t it.

“Yeah, well, turns out getting shot in the face don’t cure cancer, mate.” 

A scar ran from Tommy’s upper lip to the side of his nose where somebody somewhere had bust his face open for him, long enough ago that it had faded to a faint seam. Alfie’d never noticed before or hadn’t been close enough to make it out, at least not without Tommy trying to strangle him first. It twisted a little at whatever his mouth was doing that wasn’t a smile, then he shifted and the light changed and it vanished. 

Alfie stroked his beard, squinting his good eye at the place where the scar had been. Perfectly understandable temptation, innit, wanting to mar that impassive face. “Dunno whether anyone’s told you this fact before, anatomy not being your field, innit, beyond knowing the best places to put holes in a man, so I thought I should enlighten you. In case you’d forgotten.”

“Hmm.” Tommy reached into his pocket and produced his cigarette case. “Had other things on me mind.” He stepped on the remains of the smoldering ember he’d discarded and didn’t ask about the cancer.

Marie appeared to announce dinner with a frown that said she’d most definitely heard every shouted word and was holding back any judgments she had on the matter. They took their meal in silence, Tommy’s preoccupation obvious enough and Alfie himself wrapped up in his own internal, heated debate. Then Tommy drifted off to smoke on the balcony where Alfie eventually joined him, taking a spot next to him at the marble railing and peering out at the faint traces of the sea where the waves rose and crested, glinting with moonlight. Before that, though, he’d come to a decision. Given himself a little errand. 

“Don’t have much use for the things myself, do I, razors.” Marie’d scrounged up the safety razor for Tommy before the unfamiliar stubble had advanced too far across the planes of his face. It’d been early days then so she probably hadn’t trusted him with the straight sort, though she must not’ve been familiar with Peaky habits or she wouldn’t have just handed over a box of them double-edged blades they sewed into their fucking caps so easily. “But if you’re aiming to slit throats, mate, you’re gonna need something a bit more reliable than a hunk of fucking glass.”

Tommy turned toward him with a raised brow as Alfie held out the slim knife he’d dug out of his desk drawer after dinner. Took it from him and weighed it in his hand, then hit the trigger, the blade snapping out with a neat snick. It was a pretty thing ‘bout nine inches long when open, handle set with a polished gray horn that went silverish at the right angle, close to the color blue eyes held in the night.

“Whatever opinions you might have about ‘em after sending your plague of starlings to hell, right, they make a decent knife, the Italians.”

Tommy angled the blade so it caught a bit of lamplight from the sitting room then closed it with a practiced flick of the hand, slipping it into his trouser pocket. ‘Course he’d be skilled with a switchblade, a knife was just a fancier sort of razor, innit.

“Alfie--” He shut his mouth just as quick as he’d opened it, looking away, out at the invisible sea. When he turned back, he swayed into Alfie’s space a little, head tilted, studying him with that opaque cast to his eyes that remained infuriatingly impossible to read. 

Alfie went still as Tommy’s shoulder brushed his. He was moving with a roll to his joints, not so much clumsy as loose and easy as a man used to keeping his footing against the rocking of a boat. When he didn’t continue, Alfie hummed to himself. 

“What’re you doing here, hmm, Thomas?” Tommy just blinked at him. “Of all places a man could pick, why come to Margate?”

“Sun, sea, fucking sand.” The corner of Tommy’s mouth pulled down, not a frown but not revealing anything of his thoughts, neither. “Why not Margate?”

“Yeah, okay, before Ollie fumbled things I suppose nobody would have tracked you down, right, so after your dramatic escape, logically--”

“Maybe I wanted to shoot some fucking gulls.” His arm pressed against Alfie’s again and stayed there, caught shoulder to elbow in a not-quite-lean, hands still in his pockets. Warmth radiated off him and with it a faint hint of burnt sugar from whatever had been in the cabbie’s flask -- cheap rum, he’d guess, the brown stuff -- still working its way through his pores. “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.” He shifted a little, but the contact remained. 

“Alright,” Alfie waited for him to pull away. When he didn’t, he stayed where he was. It was strange, someone besides Marie touching him, so casual-like. It’d been awhile, is all. “First knife I ever had, me mum gave me. Must’ve been ten, yeah, and she was worried we’d get evicted. Told me to stick the next copper tried to toss us out on the street.”

“And did you?”

“Hmm. Not that time, no. What about you? Yours come from your brother? Or was it a family heirloom, passed down through generations of Shelby cutthroats.”

“No.” There was a long silence, as if he weren’t going to continue. Then: “It was Pol’s.”

“Your aunt? Shoulda known. Women of our class, right, they know what’s necessary, don’t they. They got skills for survival and they’ll pass ‘em on whether you want ‘em to or not. So how old were you, then?”

He’d gone a little vague in the profile, Tommy, like he was fading off into the distance right next to Alfie. “Don’t remember.”

Didn’t seem like prevarication, but it was hard to tell, wasn’t it. “You in school yet?”

Tommy shook his head. His eyes narrowed as if he were watching a picture show, a reel that’d broken and been spliced back together, jumping in the projector, making the image flicker and run off the screen before he could quite make it out. 

“Took it from me. Got a beating for having the bloody thing.”

“Who, your mum?”

“Nuns.” He spit out the word in the same tone he’d used to speak of slitting Mosley’s throat.

With that, his expression smoothed and he had nothing more to say. Not pulled inward this time, or gone mute, just… disinterested in continuing the conversation any further than it had already gone. 

“The cabbie,” he said, after a long while. 

Alfie turned a frown on him, almost asked _what cabbie_ before catching himself. “Yeah? Looking to return the flask he so kindly lent you?”

“Think he made me?” Not as indifferent as he thought he was pulling off.

“Nah.” Alfie glanced at him sidelong. There was another scar, nearly invisible, echoing the mark he’d noticed earlier. Not a match, but evidence of a beating worse than the one he’d taken from Sabini’s men. Not much more than a pencil tracing now, old enough to have been from well before the war, even. “Why, you aiming to slit his throat, too? Seems like a waste of effort, mate, my bet is he don't know his own MP’s name, let alone one two hundred miles away. Only reads racing papers, that bloke.”

A deep line of doubt lodged itself between Tommy’s brows, but he didn’t argue.

“You didn’t name Mosley. And he’d’ve had to follow the news pretty fucking close to put it together from what you did say.” Didn’t know why he was even making the attempt to convince, weren’t like anything he’d say would be enough to set Tommy at ease. Sure it was unlikely, but not impossible, especially if the cabbie’d had flirtations with fascists. Mosley was making himself out to be their Valentino, after all, and even cabbies had radios these days.

Tommy toyed with his cigarette, then gave a nod, his shoulders dropping a couple of inches back to their natural abode. So he hadn’t been sure, hadn’t been sure what he’d said. And this wasn’t about the cabbie, was it, not really, it was about what had happened in the cab. What had happened after the rally. Everything went back to the rally with Tommy, eventually.

“You took a risk, coming here,” Alfie said, feeling it out as he spoke, back to his original question, the one Tommy hadn’t had an answer for earlier. 

Tommy tossed his cigarette over the side of the balcony into the sand and immediately started up another. “Didn’t pull the trigger on me the first time I was here.” Shrugged, as if that answered anything.

“Why’d you think I’d be any different than all the rest of ‘em, once I got a look at you?”

Tommy pulled away from him then, coughed into his fist, clearing his throat. “Alfie,” he said, voice stripped, then stopped. 

“Do you even remember?” The night was chillier now, and wasn’t that a ridiculous thing to note.

“Remember what.” Flat, not quite hostile, and he weren’t looking anywhere near Alfie’s direction but out at the dark waves.

“How you fucking got here.”

Washed-out blue eyes searched his face, and whatever he was seeking he didn’t seem to find it.

“Took the train,” he said finally, but Alfie knew the timbre of speculation when he heard it.

“Right,” Alfie said. “Took the train.”

The question of whether he had a clear recollection of his first few days in Margate rose up and tried to escape, but he kept it on a short leash. What difference would it make, even if Tommy’d give him an answer?

“What was it like?” Speaking of inquiries he should keep to himself. 

Tommy didn’t ask what he meant. “You’ve been to prison.” 

Weren’t a question, but Alfie nodded anyhow. “Coupla times, yeah.”

“Not much different, except the jailers tell you they’re protecting you from yourself.”

Seemed more evasion than answer at first, until the bruises come to mind, the ones on his thigh where he’d been stuck by the needle over and over again, those and the others they’d found on his forearms and ribs. The ones had nothing to do with injections. 

Not much different than prison, then. Right. 

Tommy took the opportunity given him by Alfie’s lapse into questionlessness to make a strategic retreat, and when Alfie turned from the balcony back to the dim warmth of his sitting room he found himself on his own.

Later later later by the ticking of the clock Alfie dreamt of dogs bigger than wolves bigger than horses big as fucking dragons razor toothed in the torchlight as they hunted him down everywhere he went everywhere he tried to hide in the black limbed trees in the waist-deep snow. 

“Thing is they’re on a chain.” Babbling in the dark while the dogs howled and snarled behind him. “And the chain, see, the chain’s held by somebody, right, which means--”

“Mr. Solomons--” He came back to himself to find Marie trying to hand him a glass of water and a pill but he ignored her, needed to get it all out before it choked him. Hadn’t had this dream since before his first arrest, for nicking a bicycle, and it was ridiculous, you know, that his childish fears would come back to him like this tonight.

“--it means that fucking chain’s just a lead, not there to hold ‘em back at all--” He could still hear it, the whish of the sled as it cut over top the snow that trapped his legs as he tried to run. “--and it’s pulling this thing, like fucking Santa Claus--”

Marie had a grip on his shoulder, wasn’t quite pushing him back down into his pillows but looked as if she’d like to. “_Alfie_.” 

That caught him up short, burst the lurking image of whoever it was had been on the fucking sleigh before he could get it into words. The torches and the baying of the monstrous dogs faded. “Marie? What’re you--”

“You were shouting,” she said, gently this time. 

He blinked at her and silence fell and he realized he didn’t know how long he’d been ranting. Felt like a while. The horror of Tommy showing up in his doorway with him crying about his dreams to his nurse overtook him faster than the dogs. Must have been plain on his face because Marie just sighed and pressed the glass into his hand and he took a sip, the water cooling his raw throat on its way down. 

“He won’t have heard you.” 

He’d woken her, clearly. And Tommy’s room was between Alfie’s and her own. “Seems very fucking unlikely.”

Some kind of internal argument passed behind Marie’s shadow-smudged frown, and then she straightened. “He asked for a tablet before bed.”

The memory of dogs blurred into an echo of Tommy in the cab, eyes wide and unseeing as he’d invoked tanks and the bones of the dead crushed underneath, right here at home. “On top of the booze? Thought you said--” 

“Might’ve tapered him down a bit too quickly the last few days.” Marie took the glass from him and set it on his bedside table, pocketing whatever she’d wanted to dose him with. Probably the same shit she’d given Tommy. “He’s in the bed and there hasn’t been a peep.”

Exhaustion and relief and the sudden absence of adrenaline weighed him down into his blankets, twisted around his knees. “Yeah, alright, goodnight Marie,” he said, solidly enough to reassure her back to her own room at last.

Hadn’t wanted to dream tonight, Tommy, or chat with his ghosts, so the nightmares had come to Alfie’s door instead. 

Fucking bastard could've warned him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone sticking with this story!
> 
> There's a line in here I became suddenly paranoid I had inadvertently lifted from someone else. If you recognize it, apologies!


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for discussion of antisemitism and antizigonism.

“So you’ll come to the office, then? Say Tuesday morning?”

In the time since Alfie’d stripped off his shirt the buttons had gained an invisible bit of extra width, just enough that they didn’t fit the buttonholes anymore. He must’ve made some kind of noise the doctor took as a sign of distraction because the man went on as if Alfie hadn’t fucking heard him the first time.

“You’re due for a new set of x-rays, it’ll give us a sense of how things are progressing.”

He considered saying he’d be busy this Tuesday and next Tuesday and every Tuesday after that. Lots to do, yeah. Newspapers to read, fascists to assassinate. Before he could think up a response that would snuff any further argument, there was a noise in the hall. Footsteps, heavier than Marie’s tread, unless she’d taken to impersonating an elephant for laughs. And then Tommy Shelby paused in the doorway wearing a coolly evaluating curiosity as he peered into the office.

Fuck. He’d left the door open. Hadn’t expected Tommy back from his pile of papers for another couple hours.

Tommy blinked and then moved on, disappearing down the hall towards his room, and Alfie found himself agreeing, yeah yeah, Tuesday, nine o’clock. Anything to get the quack out of the picture.

To the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody he’d spent most of the past two days at the library in Margate, Tommy, pouring over back issues of the London Times and the Spectator and the Daily Mail. Alfie’d invited himself along with the excuse he had nothing better to do, which was more or less true while still being a lie at the heart of it, but Tommy hadn’t commented on his presence. Hadn’t done more than raise one of those arched brows of his, neither, when an hour into Friday’s visit Alfie asked him what he was looking for.

“Would've thought it'd be obvious,” he’d said, after a pause.

“Besides the fucking obvious,” Alfie retorted, sitting himself across from Tommy at the wide table he’d staked out for his piles. “Must be something, I mean, or you wouldn’t waste your time poking through the whole bloody paper, would you, you’d scan the politics section and get on to the next one.”

Tommy hesitated. “I’ll know when I see it.”

Couldn’t tell if it was distrust or something else, that instinct that told a man scanning the horizon which direction the next shot would come from.

“Hrm, alright,” Alfie said. “Question is will *I* know it, mate?”

With that he’d started in on one of Tommy’s piles. Set aside anything featuring Mosley or the British Union of Fascists or the Billy Boys, waiting for that unarticulated thing to catch his eye. Felt like stumbling through the woods at night without a torch, didn’t it, not without anything more to go on. Did the same thing the next day, spectacles perched on his nose, the print blurring after a couple hours.

This morning he’d begged off without explanation and Tommy, true to form, hadn’t asked for one. Tommy’s pattern the last two days had taken them to the library at opening and kept them past when a civilized man would be looking for a mid-day meal, so he’d thought he’d have time, yeah, for a private bad news session with his doctor. No such luck.

So finishing off his buttons he pulled on his waistcoat and herded the doctor out to the door, which meant passing through the sitting room, naturally, where Tommy was perched in his usual chair with his nose in a book, ignoring the stranger in his midst. Weren’t Nietzsche taking up his attention this time, instead a pile of books lay stacked at his feet, none of which looked like they’d come from Alfie’s own shelves.

“Thought you would’ve got your fill of squinting at tiny scribbles on the page by now, you know, or did you run through Margate’s supply of news already?”

Tommy glanced up over top the cover of his book -- the spine announced _The Decline of the West _\-- a question hovering behind the round lenses of his ridiculous glasses. Before he could say anything Alfie plucked a slim package from the table next to his couch and held it out. The thing had come with the post that morning just before the doctor arrived and now made for a convenient distraction from the query Alfie had no intention of allowing airing.

Of course Tommy didn’t take it from him. “What is it?”

“You want me to read aloud to you, like a fucking schoolteacher?”

Something dangerously close to a roll of the eyes preceded Tommy setting aside his book and taking the package. He slipped the manuscript out of its envelope and frowned. “How did you get this?” He didn’t look up, flipping through the pages as he spoke, perturbed lines framing his mouth.

“Still got connections in London, don’t I.”

“Hmm.” He’d turned back to the start and was studying it in earnest now, and just like that Alfie was forgotten. Which had been his intention, yeah, but it left him standing there out of sorts as an abandoned child.

“Right,” he said, and settled into his couch to smoke his pipe while Tommy read through the copy of the Mosley Memorandum it had cost a pretty penny to purloin for him.

When he reached the end he read it again and after he did that he handed it back to Alfie and collected his overcoat and walked out the door without a word. Alfie took his afternoon meal without him, scanning the memorandum over his roast and Yorkshire pudding, and gave Marie noncommittal answers to her nagging about the doctor. She’d just get the gossip directly from the man himself anyway so there didn’t seem to be much point in the effort, was there.

It was dry reading, this, and entirely lacking in the magnetism from the night of the rally. More a drab business proposal, a prospectus, which was exactly what it was meant to be. Something palatable for its intended audience of government ministers, rather than for the seething mass of rage he’d whipped up at Bingley Hall. That in and of itself might have been enough to send Tommy out to walk the beach, he supposed. A man who controlled who he was speaking to and how best to reach them, leaving out any element which would disinterest or disgust another audience while keeping an eye on both, now that was a man knew exactly what he was doing, right. Yeah.

Tommy came back eventually from his trek and cleared the plate Marie forced on him in the kitchen and when he was done he paced the length of the sitting room a couple of times while he sucked down a cigarette as dessert.

“Take a seat, mate, these perambulations of yours are exhausting to watch.”

Whether out of innate bullheadedness or because he couldn’t stand to stay in one fucking place, Tommy followed his route from the balcony door and back until he’d finished his smoke, then settled into his chair.

“So.”

Alfie supposed that was all the opening he was gonna get. “Yeah, so. Laid it out for them, hasn’t he. The respectable bits anyhow.”

“Hmm.”

Back to monosyllables, were we? Alfie pressed on. “What’s his appeal, Mosley? How does he win them over? Not through a boring stack of paper like this, innit. Populism, sure, right, get the honest men back to honest work and all that but what sets him apart from the Bolsheviks, in the eyes of the worker?”

Tommy pinched the bridge of his nose. “You heard his speech.”

“Before it was drowned out by your riot, yeah, which was the most satisfying bit of the entire evening,” Alfie said. “It was a rhetorical question, mate. It’s the hate, the sheer fucking joy of it, because otherwise they’d be Communists, you know. Unions don’t give 'em that, and Bolsheviks, right, Bolsheviks are _foreign_. Right there in the name. Not British. But this--” Alfie tapped the memorandum where he’d left it on his table. “He appeals to the toffs too, which the Communists will never do, will they.”

Tommy’s eyes focused somewhere in the space between them, moving as if he were reading the air. “‘Parties and the Party game belong to the old civilization and have failed.’”

“And he’s right, yeah. They do and they have and people know it. The Tories are shriveled old men stuck in the muck, even the young ones. Labour can’t ever make up its fucking mind, endlessly debating the details while children starve in the street.” He made a face, some of his own cynicism leaking into the words. Politicians had never done nothing for him or his neighbors, be they Jew or gentile. Worse than the coppers. At least the coppers could be put to work, for the right price. “People are fed up. And that was before the crash.”

“He fills a gap,” Tommy said finally. His hands dropped to hang loose between his knees. When he next spoke, it was with a pause between each thought as he shaped it, handling his words carefully as a match near petrol. “Something new. Revolution the toffs can swallow, one that doesn’t scare off the middle class.”

Alfie nodded. “Tariffs to protect British industries, public works to get men back on the payroll, pensions at sixty for manual laborers. Something for everybody.”

“They see themselves as the new Roman Empire. ‘Fascism alone can preserve the Peace, because it alone removes the causes of war.’”

“Pax Romana, hmm, with your friend Oswald as Caesar. So how does Facism go about achieving this miracle where all others have failed?”

“It won’t,” Tommy said wearily, pressing a thumb into one eye socket, chasing an ache or whatever it was he saw playing out when he shut his lids.

Alfie waited, but he didn’t seem likely to continue without further prodding. “Right, well, what happens then? After their promises turn out to be dust? Papers say unemployment could reach two million by winter.”

“Alfie,” Tommy ran a hand over his skull, ruffling butchered hair into spikes, then rocked forward, eyes locked on his, whatever weariness he’d felt overcome by the strung-out vehemence of a man with his back to the wall. “Mussolini sent him funds. He’s got a director of propaganda. He’s got a defence force in barracks in London, a hundred and fifty men in black shirts. They’ve started their own fucking newspaper.”

“Right,” Alfie said. It had started off a bit like this in the cab, hadn’t it. He pressed on, watching Tommy as he spoke. “So what were you going to do about that, after the bullet disintegrated his brain?”

“I had a strategy.” Tommy jerked to his feet, stalking the short space in front of the balcony doors before coming to a choppy halt, staring out at the sand or somewhere else entirely. “Steer ‘em back towards Socialism.” There was no conviction behind it.

“How? Had you even worked that out?” It was preposterous. Couldn’t have been his entire plan, this, there must have been _something_ else. “Do you really think they'd have followed you, being who you are? Same fuckers spitting tinker scum at you just gonna turn around and meekly let you lead ‘em away from hell and back to the side of the angels?”

It had to be said. But Tommy just stood there at attention, ramrod straight with hands clasped behind his back, shoulders stiff, and for a few ticks of the clock Alfie thought he’d pushed too far. Waited for the moment to shatter into razor-edged fragments, like his mirror had done.

The limping thing underneath Tommy’s next words crept down his back like icy fingers. “I stood up there on that stage, and all those people--” he broke off. Cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his voice was still hollow, but steadier. “Always before it had been a couple of 'em at a time. This was a thousand at once.”

Yeah. It’d been an evil enough assault over the radio, from hundreds of miles away. One he’d felt in his chest like the blastwave from a shell burst. “You wouldn't’ve been giving ‘em what they're getting from Mosley, that regular dose of hate.”

Tommy nodded at the balcony and the view outside and didn’t turn around. Seemed more solid than he had in the cab, more controlled anyway, but Alfie decided a slight change in tactics might be in order before things got hairy. Get at the matter sideways, maybe. “Been there a couple years by now, you got any allies in the House you can trust?”

“With this?” Not quite enough color in the question to be incredulous, closer to despair. “There’s men in Labour who support my proposals, but I’m not… one of them.”

“Is it that they don’t trust you or is it that you don’t trust them?”

“Hmm,” Tommy said. “Bit of both, really.”

“Too used to only trusting family, yeah.” It was a necessity in men like them, in their kind of business, and a weakness all the same.

“An MP approached me before the rally. A Tory.”

Before Alfie could grapple with this revelation, Marie swept into the room carrying a tray of tea. At the new sound from behind him Tommy spun round from the balcony, gave the perimeter of the room an automatic scan, then leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. Blinked at Marie like an alleycat waiting for the boot as he pulled out his pack of cigarettes and shook one free, studying it for a flaw that’d make it unsmokeable. She set her tray down, sent Alfie a quick glance he couldn’t quite read and departed without comment. Always could read a room when she chose to, Marie.

Once she’d disappeared back into the house Tommy did his little ritualistic swiping of the cigarette over his bottom lip and then finally lit the bloody thing.

“This bloke who approached you,” Alfie said, picking up the thread since Tommy seemed unlikely to himself. “Would he be an asset?”

“Dunno.” Tommy rolled his cigarette between his fingers, gaze on the ember like it might tell him the answer. “We have… history.”

Hmm. History, in this context, could mean any number of things. Alfie poured himself a cup of tea and gave it a sip. “You trust him?”

“No. But he has no love for Mosley.”

“And why is that, you think?”

“Praised Mussolini a couple years back for how he suppressed the Communists in Italy. Hates them, like any good Conservative. But Mosley betrayed them by crossing over to Labour. Opposed funding the overthrow of the Bolsheviks, says he’ll eliminate differences in social class, that they depend on the idleness of the rich. Not popular ideas with the Tories.”

“Hmm. Replacing class with the brotherhood of the British, right.”

“A brotherhood of equals with him on top.” His cigarette sketched a pyramid in the air, jabbed at the invisible apex for good measure. “And they decide who gets to be British and who doesn’t count.”

“That would be you and me, mate. And both our peoples.”

“It’s nothing new,” Tommy said. “They pretend to be fucking _modern_ but it’s nothing new.”

“My men told me your brother, right, they told me he was a beacon of solidarity as he handed out crowbars,” Alfie said, setting his teacup down and clasping his hands over his chest as he leaned back, studying Tommy. “Did he mean it?”

“Yeah, he meant it.” Tommy paced forward to stub out his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray left on the table next to his armchair and fished out his crumpled pack again. At the rate he was going through the things Marie was going to have to order another crate. “Might not read the papers but he understands the stakes.”

“And the rest of the family?”

An orange glow played along Tommy’s cheekbones as he cupped his match as if he were outdoors in the wind, and a haze of smoke followed as he returned to the balcony doors. Alfie hadn’t quite nailed down why the spot drew him so obsessively, but imagined being locked in a windowless cell for two months might’ve had something to do with it. Nothing like losing any view of the outside world, you know, to increase your appreciation of the horizon.

“Ada was a Communist. Knows more about fascism than I do, probably.”

“Could any of them have--”

“It wasn’t family.”

“Sure of that, are you. What about that cousin of yours, the one who--”

Sharp look at that. “Didn’t know about it.”

Right. Whether that was the reality of the situation or not, he weren’t getting anywhere on that track anytime soon, was he. “What about the bomb, hmm, outside your office. Papers said it was IRA.”

Tommy shook his head. “It was meant for the man it killed, and it wasn’t anything to do with Irish business.”

“The man killed was Intelligence, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “He was… his boss plays polo with Mosley.”

Yeah. Hadn’t thought it’d be coincidence, the death of an intelligence officer in Tommy Shelby’s back yard. “So the bullet wasn’t your first strategy then.”

“No.” Something about him went unfocussed. Vacant. So they’d stumbled into another field strewn with landmines, had they. Fucking hell but there were a lot of them. Never knew where to step next. “I tried to… I was feeding him evidence. On Mosley. Hoped it could go through official channels.”

“Fuck me,” Alfie said, despite himself. “This why you threw your lot in with him, instead of speaking out against him?”

“Mosley approached me.” A little bit of life returned, edged with a bitter irony that shaded into self-hatred. Alfie wondered if he even knew it was there. Likely did, given his experience of the man, but the fact he was letting it show so obviously was something to mull over. “It was an opportunity to work from the inside. But Section D, Intelligence, Special Branch, whoever they fucking are they’re protecting him.”

“You think they was the ones sabotaged your plan that night?”

“If it’d been them I’d’ve never got that far and even if I had, I wouldn’t’ve made it out of the building. The bang outside my office was a warning. A reminder they can reach anyone at any time.”

As if he’d needed one. They’d gone after his family before, gone after his kid, crushed his fucking skull. He’d wear evidence of their brand of warning for the rest of his life, Tommy. “They threaten you direct?”

“Didn’t have to. Younger--” Tommy shifted his weight and took a drag on his cigarette. “He was seeing my sister.” His sister, who was pregnant. “This, this thing. It’s already got one of my men killed, a soldier. My sister’s man and my aunt’s as well, and-- and there was a-- a-- a boy, a neighborhood kid, caught in the explosion. Ten years old. I can’t afford-- I have to make sure, this time.”

“That’s why you want to go it alone. Avoid collateral damage.”

“Yeah. It’s-it has to be done but the risk--”

“Always risk to civilians in war, ain’t there.”

“Alfie--”

“There’s risk, right, risk in moving against him, now. But if you wait-- me mum was driven out of her village before I was born, her father and brother shot in front of her.” Alfie caught himself with fists ready to strike and jaw about to crack teeth and forced them to loosen, which took more effort than he’d ever admit to. “That's what these blackshirts want to do to us if they’re not stopped. Drive us out of our homes with torches and with dogs, because we’ll never be British enough for ‘em.”

Tommy stared at him, then gave a short nod, shoulders drooping with a strange sort of relief. Who else had he tried to convince of the danger? Had he tried? Official channels, he’d said, and got a bomb in answer, and one less future brother in law. Would the sister be any help in this fight, past political persuasion aside, after losing the father of her child to it?

“Tried informing on the fucker, tried shooting him in the head. So what's to be done about it?”

If Tommy’s smoky exhalation was a little shaky, Alfie didn’t let on he’d noticed. “Churchill said it’s a weed, needs torn up and scorched from the earth, kill the roots.”

He raised a brow at that. A Tory MP had approached him. Right. Well, it hadn’t been a lie, that, Winston Churchill was certainly both those things. “And that's what you wanted to avoid, yeah? The churning and scorching? Why should they be spared, these fuckers who want what Mosley wants?”

“Because they're not the only ones who will be plowed under.”

He could hear Marie in the doorway to the sitting room behind him, but his question was too pressing to turn round and see what she wanted. “And what if it can't be done any other way?”

Marie cleared her throat politely, but Tommy hadn’t seemed to have noticed her, back still to the room. There was a woman with her Alfie didn’t recognize, older than Ada Thorne had been, older than Tommy, but he could see the resemblance, right, if only in the way she occupied the unfamiliar space as if it were her birthright.

“I’m a junior member in the House, and one of dubious reputation at that,” Tommy continued, oblivious. “Even with Churchill’s support, it’s going to take--”

The new presence in the room must have sunk in, or maybe a change in the quality of the silence. When Tommy finally turned it was as if all the air was sucked from the room.

“Don’t let me stop you,” Polly Gray said. “Found your voice after all, eh Thomas?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Mosley Memorandum dates to January 1930, but most of the rest of the historical stuff here including Tommy's quotes of Mosley himself have been moved up in time to accomodate the show's compressed timeline. The Memorandum actually came out a couple of years before Mosley founded the BUF so in the context of this fic it's more overtly fascist than it most likely would have been taken as at the time it was produced.
> 
> I did notice after writing much of this that there is a reference to the Memorandum in the show, Tommy mentions it without naming it in one of his speeches in Parliament, but we'll ignore that for the sake of this fic. Unless you've been immersing yourself in the history you probably wouldn't have caught it, I definitely didn't the first 89 times I saw that episode. It's a neat detail though.
> 
> Thanks so much for sticking with this story! I'm thinking it will be 20 chapters in all, but that may change.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings specific to this chapter in end notes.

A festering thing, this silence, blackened and brittle and bloated, maggots writhing underneath the stretched skin of it, waiting to burst through. There was the silence of the dead and the silence of the rotting and this, this was a silence far too advanced in its putrefaction to be covered by any balm of polite manners. Marie’s eyes met his and he read the knowledge of it there just as she could see it in him, he supposed, obvious as it was. And yet she didn’t retreat and as the silence reeked between them all Alfie realized she was waiting for him to take up a shovel and bury it.

Fucking hell.

“Zenobia, Queen Mother of Palmyra. I’ve heard things, haven’t I, yeah, things that’d make a hard man’s blood run cold, but until now I haven’t had the pleasure.”

The imperious gaze slid over him as if he were a cheap attraction at the fair, nothing but a trick she’d seen through years before and now found tiresome.

“I asked you a question,” her highness said to Tommy, who continued to stare at her as though he’d taken a blow to the back of his skull. “Ada said you wouldn't speak to her, that you’d only lower yourself to communicate with notes. So was it all just a ruse, your madness, or have you been miraculously cured?”

The room had filled with a heady mix of rosy sandalwood and hot iron on linen, costly in its elegance. Marie must’ve taken her coat already because she was dressed to the nines, the Shelby matriarch, in a slimly draped sheath and matching jacket that’d probably come from Paris. Looked like she was on her way to some evening affair, not the coastal retreat of a deceased degenerate where her prodigal relation had been hiding out after escaping an asylum. She took a moment to give him a good study, Tommy, where he stood poleaxed in his department store shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and too long by an inch trousers that had never felt a tailor’s touch. If concern for him had been any part of her motivation for the drive all the way the fuck to Margate, it didn’t show. But then, if she was anything like Tommy -- and chances were she was -- it wouldn’t, would it.

“I came to see you once, in that place. Do you remember?” From the way his eyes followed her every movement, wide as a hare hypnotized by a cobra, he hadn’t. “You’d broken the nose of an orderly that morning when they tried to feed you. The great Tommy Shelby, swaddled like a child who refuses to behave.”

The cigarette had smouldered down in Tommy’s fingers, ember nearly to his knuckles. His hand jerked and he tossed the thing to the floorboards then ground it out with one shoe, eyes never breaking with his aunt’s as if waiting for her to strike.

“You had them all hoodwinked but I’d a suspicion about what you were up to. Threw a tantrum at being denied your heart’s true desire and couldn’t face the consequences of what you’d done. Without Mosley gone your road to Prime Minister will be a rocky one, won’t it.”

Must’ve been plain on his face, Alfie’s astonishment at the accusation, because she turned that regal glare on him.

“What, nothing to say to that? What promise did he give you if you cast your lot with him?”

“Well,” Alfie said, glancing at Tommy. A second shock, one to his propriety this time, might just be enough to prod a response out of him. “Thought about asking for the hand of his only sister, didn’t I, but turns out the conjugal--”

“Mr. Solomons,” Marie’s stern glower might have been intended as chastisement, but it was too far buried under worry for Tommy to have much bite. “Seems this is a family matter, and seeing how you haven’t had your massage today--”

“Forgive me.” Dripping venom, Polly Gray’s attention returned to her nephew. “Perhaps he didn’t know about Bedlam, your host. Might get in the way of your political ambitions, should word get out. Did you have any interest in what happened with your opium scheme, or are you not to be bothered with that sort of trivia during your seaside holiday?”

As if stirring from a trance, Tommy blinked once, twice, then cleared his throat. “Well, it’s not Monte Carlo…” Seemed a weak parry to all that’d come before and it was delivered in a toneless drawl, but all the same she reeled as if it’d been a slap, raw with hurt. He spoke again before she could recover. “Is there some reason you’ve come?”

Marie, unflappable as she was, had had enough of the ugliness. “It’s past time for tea,” she announced, then turned her back on the room and made her escape.

Alfie didn’t move, riveted to his seat by the spectacle playing out before him. He’d thought he'd seen the depths of Tommy’s anger when it’d been aimed at him but it turned out that had been nothing at all, hadn’t it. Except this weren’t anger, weren’t rage, it was something else entirely, like watching a pit open up right at your fucking feet, a pit to hell. But no flames in this hell, were there. It was a bottomless, eternal Siberia down there.

“I’ve been told you know who killed Aberama Gold,” his aunt said. “I wanted to hear it from you myself.”

Full of unlikely fucking names, the Peaky stable. Curly, Scudboat, Aberama. It’d be worth a laugh if it weren’t all so deadly serious.

Tommy had pulled out his pack of cigarettes and was taking his time with it, shaking one out and then tapping it back in place. “Who told you that, Pol?”

She lifted her chin. “My dead fiancé.”

Tommy’s jaw worked, testing out the words before he spoke them. “Aberama made his choice.” He returned the crumpled package to his trouser pocket without selecting a smoke. “He put his son first, you should understand that.”

And that was an obvious fucking dig this time, one even Alfie could pick up on contextless as he was, but she ignored it. “Oh, but you draw them in, don’t you. Offer temptations they can’t refuse, if only they’ll do your bidding.”

Now Marie was gone from her side she ventured a few steps into the room finally and as if unaware of what he was doing, Tommy backed away until his shoulders bumped up against the balcony doors again. Alfie watched her watching Tommy as for the first time something unsettled rose to the surface of her bitterness, but she pressed on.

“Aberama tells me there's a lot you know about that night that you haven't shared. Another benefit of your bluff, I suppose. Can’t expect explanations from psychosis.”

They was talking of the dead as if it were an everyday occurrence to hear from ‘em, which put Tommy’s midnight conversings in an altogether different sort of light, didn’t it.

“Why do you think that is, Pol. Why would he tell me who killed him and not tell you.”

This, this set her aback, didn’t it. And Alfie thought maybe he remembered the chat in question, the night he’d thrown the glass pitcher at his wall, though Tommy hadn’t put a name to his visitor. _I’ve known him a hell of a lot longer than I knew you_, Tommy’d said of his Judas, of the man his aunt’s ghostly paramour had accused of murder.

“So you do know.” Whether she’d hoped her spirit had lied or hoped she’d been wrong about Tommy’s intentions to tell her about it, either way the damage was plain, a bruise just under the surface she was fighting not to show.

Tommy, naturally, had gone maddingly high-handed. “I’ve a good idea.”

“And you’ve done nothing about it.”

He just stared at her as if the information weren’t something she could be trusted with, and Alfie saw it again, the resemblance, in the haughtiness they both clothed themselves in, simultaneous shield and dagger.

Halving the distance between them, she left Tommy no further room to retreat. He didn’t flinch but the aura of a cornered beast had returned. “Who did it, Thomas?”

“It’s part of a larger--”

Before Tommy could get out the rest of whatever excuse he’d been formulating, whether to put her off or to defend himself, she yanked a fucking revolver from the holster Alfie hadn’t noticed under her fancy silk jacket from Paris and aimed it at his head. “_Who fucking did it?_”

She was nearly even with Alfie’s couch now and in her fury seemed to have forgotten about him entirely. If he picked his moment, he could get his hands on the gun in one lurching grab. If his body didn’t fail him, slow him down enough she saw it coming. If she didn’t just pull the trigger while he was making up his fucking mind. He was about to take his chances when he noticed Tommy had frozen, but his attention weren’t on the gun or even on the woman wielding it. At first Alfie thought maybe he was doing his damndest to brush off the threat, but his gaze had fixed somewhere past her shoulder then drifted, locked onto whatever it was he was seeing as it moved. Fuck. Fucking hell.

The gun wavered. She was finally unnerved, Polly Gray.

“Who is it? Who’s here with us?” Fucking inconsistent to insist he’d faked his breakdown but was seeing a real spirit now, wasn’t it. Had she really believed her accusations at all, or had they been a shiv to wound him into telling her what she wanted to know?

Tommy’s breath caught, as if whoever it was had spoken to him. His aunt’s eyes narrowed and Alfie could tell she wanted to turn, to check whether there was anything behind her. To know who it was. It bothered her, the not knowing.

“Convenient, your silences.” The poison had drained nearly away by time she spoke again. The gun sank until it was pointed around Tommy’s knees. “Are your strategies more important than avenging blood?”

He’d gone ashy, Tommy, looked as if he were holding back the urge to be sick all over Alfie’s carpet, but his voice was steady enough. “Aberama wasn’t blood.” Wide eyes still on his ghost, real or imagined.

“You threatened to kill him. Anyone who gets in the way of your bloody ambition--”

“Yeah,” Tommy bit off, tearing himself away from the unearthly presence. “You’ve figured it out.”

As far as attempts to avoid taking a bullet went, this weren’t the best tactic Alfie’d seen.

“Tommy…” Might as well have been a phantom himself, for all the attention they paid him.

“So did you have him killed, or did you do it yourself?” She was trying to rile herself back up, but instead just sounded burnt out and weary with it. “Michael’s blood, my blood, and he’s opposed you directly. Threatened everything you’ve built for yourself.”

_There’s some kind of feud in the family_, Ollie’d told him after the Shelbys freed him. And it came back to him, then-- Tommy’d called him on the telephone. Late, the night of his first visit to Margate, before the Mosley disaster. Fucking hung up on him twice, and Alfie never had gotten out of him why the fuck he’d called in the first place, had he. Talked about a war. _Family business_. With everything that had fallen out since then he’d almost forgotten.

“You can end this war your son started.” Tommy pushed off the balcony door and stalked straight towards the gun. “Guarantee the outcome you’ve foreseen.”

It lifted again, the gun, barrel pointed at his heart. Tommy paused but there was an edge to him Alfie didn’t trust, the glint in the eye men got before they did something irreversibly stupid. Should have caught it earlier, right, because the fiend was doing his fucking best to goad her into firing, wasn’t he.

Alfie made it to his feet, leaning hard on his cane. “Fucking hell, Tom, will you just--”

“Stay out of this,” Polly Gray snapped at him, her finger curling around the trigger. “It’s none of your concern.”

He turned on her. “None of my concern, when you’re intending to spray his fucking blood all over my sitting room? Family business, right. I had it twisted, didn’t I, you’re not Zenobia at all, are you, no, you’re the fucking Morrigan.” Her gun hand trembled but he couldn’t tell if it was fear or doubt or rage. “Fuck’s sake. Why’d you come here, hmm, whose bloody armour are you washing, his or your son’s?”

“You can end it here and now, Pol.” Tommy ignored him and pressed closer, narrowed the gap between him and the gun to a spare few feet. Gave her no room to miss, close enough the bullet would cave his chest in if she pulled the trigger. “No one to interfere with Michael’s ascension to the throne. You can even call it self-defense if you like.”

It weren’t hate that warred in her, Alfie saw then. Weren’t wrath that held the gun steady on her nephew. It was something cut deeper than that, despondent. She’d wanted Tommy to prove her wrong, he realized with a jolt. Wanted him to join her in avenging her man’s death. Wanted him to smooth things over with her son, to fix it all. Funny way she had of going about it, but then she was a Shelby, right.

“Don’t think I won’t do it,” she said, then lowered the gun. “Arthur and Ada are still yours, if you’re so determined to break this family in two. Lizzie and Finn may be harder to win over.”

Tommy, well, Tommy apparently had nothing to say to that. Just watched her pack her gun away, turn her back on him, and leave.

“She still here?”

Alfie’d given him a good long while to do something, anything, while the grandfather clock went through its paces and chimed four, but Tommy’d just stood there in the middle of the sitting room like a child cast aside at a workhouse waiting in line for his bread and gruel. Marie made an appearance, an altogether different question plain on her face as she asked if they wanted tea, but when neither of them answered she retreated back to the cozy safety of the kitchen, he supposed. After she’d gone Tommy coughed into one fist and finally seemed to notice Alfie’s existence again, though only in a cursory sort of way.

“Who.”

Who. Alfie let himself topple back onto his couch, all at once dead on his feet. “Your wife. The first one, anyhow, far as I’ve heard the current Mrs. Shelby is still among the living. That’s who you’re seeing, innit.”

A muscle in Tommy’s jaw jumped as if he’d just now realized Alfie might have picked up on the visitation, but he kept his silence about whether or not she was still floating around the room, Grace Shelby.

Fine. Plenty of other things needed answering. Alfie scrubbed at his eyes, all his fucking questions weighing him down like lead. “Sit down, yeah? S’like conversing with a fucking tree.”

As if freed from his paralysis by the order Tommy dropped into his armchair and began absently picking at the frayed cloth of the armrest.

“So what did happen, you know, after the rally.”

“Why?” It came detached, like the answer wouldn’t mean nothing to nobody, curiousity the farthest thing from his mind. “I’ve been here all this time and you haven’t asked me about it. Why now.”

Alfie shrugged and pushed on. For all the potential prying the afternoon’s visitors -- corporeal and incorporeal -- provided him, the words took remarkable effort to properly assemble. “Your sister, she told me your gardener found you, yeah.”

Tommy nodded as if his body were a machine he was operating from far off, but he answered this time. “At the chapel. At her grave.”

So that was confirmation, then, innit, of who he’d been seeing. “You’d been there all night?” Tommy didn’t respond. “Said you was covered in mud, your sister.”

“Yeah.” Gone all the way away now, Tommy, as if he’d passed through a foggy veil. “I’d been digging.”

Of course he fucking had. “Digging up the grave?” Alfie held a shiver in check as Tommy turned those spectral fucking eyes on him. “Why?”

Tommy swallowed and rubbed at his thigh with one hand, like he was wiping away the graveyard dirt. “Had to make sure.”

“Make sure she was in there?”

He hesitated, nodded. More there than here.

“You tell your family what you was doing?”

“Might’ve.” The nod had faded into a faint rocking, like he’d done that first night during the radio broadcast. “They can… they can come back if they’re not buried properly. If you don’t, don’t take precautions.”

A spirit, Ada Thorne had said. Looking for revenge.

“And were you able to, you know...” Alfie asked carefully, his weariness forgotten for a moment, hooked by the scene in his mind’s eye. He swept one hand through the air like a shovel. “Finish the job?”

Tommy shook his head. “The man and his son. The gardeners. They found me before… they didn’t understand. Wouldn’t let me finish.” He weren’t looking at Alfie anymore, searching out the ghost that’d apparently crept across the room while they’d been talking and was lurking behind the couch.

The hair at the back of Alfie’s neck stood at attention. “She talking to you right now?”

“No,” Tommy said, going still. “Doesn’t say anything anymore.”

“Why is that, you think?”

“She knows I know. What she wants.”

“And what is it she wants from you, Tommy?”

But he kept the answer to that question to himself.

It’d been a day, hadn’t it. Felt like it’d been a week, in the way some days pushed past their natural boundaries until a man could live a whole year in a handful of hours. Done in completely, Alfie’d taken himself to bed early and was just settling in with a book, Jules Verne this time, when a short rap on the door broke the welcome peace.

“Yeah, alright, give me a minute,” he muttered when the sound came again. He heaved himself upright free of the clinging pillows, swinging his legs around to dangle while he hunted around for his cane. “Or more like ten, hmm.”

Whoever it was stopped the racket but didn’t announce themselves. Most likely it was Marie with some potion for him to swallow or an insistence on delivering his forgotten massage, late as it was. She’d tried to probe him about the afternoon’s excitement over dinner, which Tommy had predictably skipped in favor of disappearing into his room, but he’d been too beat to talk about the matter even if he’d wanted to, which he hadn’t. Maybe that’s why she was at his door, to have another go at getting the gossip. Uncharitable thought, he knew; given Marie’s dedication to sheepdogging everyone sharing a roof with her she weren’t after the information as idle entertainment.

By the time he got himself vertical his bones was whining at him and his joints creaked like the timbers in a collapsing house and his head, frankly, swam just a bit to the point where he’d have gladly accepted whatever tablet Marie had on offer. He pulled on his robe, grumbling to himself, and hobbled to the door. Yanked the thing open to find it weren’t Marie at all, but Tommy Shelby, still fully dressed and wide awake. A little twitchy, even, like a man who’d been pacing a cell too long.

For once Alfie was wordless, too tired to carry the weight of the conversation, so they just stood there staring at each other like mannequins in a shop window. If Tommy’d reverted to speechlessness he was going to have to get his notebook because Alfie weren’t up to guessing whatever it was he wanted. After a drawn out moment where Tommy seemed to be waiting for Alfie to do something, he dug into one of his trouser pockets and held out the horn handled switchblade in one hand.

“Take it,” Tommy said, and if it weren’t quite an order, it was in the same neighborhood.

Alfie tilted his head back and scratched at his beard. “That was a gift, mate.”

Tommy just stood there with his hand out while Alfie struggled to work out whatever the clockwork in his head had been up to in the past few hours. Nothing good, from the looks of him. Deep lines punctuated either side of his mouth and his shirt was wrinkled and Alfie hadn’t heard him go out but he carried with him a faint whiff of pine like he’d been sleeping in a bed of needles.

“Won’t you need it for all them throats you’re aiming to slit?” Alfie asked finally.

“No… no slitting throats tonight,” Tommy said, and then swallowed down whatever else he’d meant to say. “Give it back in the morning, eh.”

Right. Alfie waited another beat and then took the thing from him, slipping it into the pocket of his robe. His task accomplished, Tommy seemed cast adrift, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself but had no intention of returning to the solitude of his room. So it was one of those kinds of nights, then, where a man can’t trust himself on his own with his thoughts. Or his ghosts, in this case, perhaps.

“Hmm. Since I’ve gone to the trouble of being upright again, might as well make use of it,” Alfie said, and stepped into the hall.

Tommy stumbled a little to get out of his path then followed Alfie like a stray as he made his slow way to the kitchen. Watched him put the kettle on and take down two teacups, pouring a bit of cream in the bottom of each and then a spoonful of sugar, chattering about Captain Nemo fighting devilfish and maelstroms while they waited for the water to boil, mouth moving mostly on its own by that point.

“The Americans call this concoction cambric tea, yeah, which is a ridiculous fucking name, innit,” Alfie said, topping off the teacups with hot water after the kettle sang. “Thin as cheap fabric. But it has its charms, on nights like these.”

It was a drink meant for children and old folks, but Tommy accepted it without comment, and when Alfie took a seat at the kitchen table he did the same.

Like one of them medieval torture devices made up of iron spikes, the chair was sheer hell on his back. All the same he was overtaxed enough he nearly nodded off while Tommy sipped his thin nursery tea, draped in the silence of the moment after a shellburst sucked all the air from your lungs and knocked you flat. It was that kind of night, yeah. So, bulwark against it, he launched into the story of how he and Cyril had come to be acquainted.

“Alfie.” His head jerked up at the sound of his own name and he nearly knocked his empty teacup to the floor. Tommy waited until he’d blinked himself to semi-awareness again before he went on. “Go to bed, yeah?”

“Nahhh, mate, evening’s young,” he rumbled, but his eyelids were already on their descent again.

“Alfie.”

He pulled himself upright in the chair and winced. “You want more?” Whether he meant tea or conversation weren’t entirely clear even to himself.

“No.” Tommy stood, waiting for him, Alfie supposed, to do as he’d commanded.

“Who are you, right, to be handing out orders to me this time of night, giving me orders like you’re some kind of fucking officer.”

“It’s half ten,” Tommy said.

“Yeah alright, fucking fine.” He got himself to his feet again and leaned on his cane so hard it felt like the thing might snap, but it didn’t. Hadn’t ever happened, not yet, but if Alfie’d learnt one thing over the years it was to never make assumptions about the structural integrity of anything you had to bank on with too much confidence.

In the wake of the one waved around that afternoon Alfie’d stashed a gun under the couch in the sitting room and there was all the knives here in the kitchen and the razors Marie’d bought Tommy for shaving with, not to mention the fucking ocean outside if he were truly determined. Handing over the switchblade weren't anything but symbolic. But the skittish, high-strung air about him had faded and now he just looked as dog tired as Alfie felt, though less stooped by it, the bastard.

Some border had been strengthened, maybe, a threshold left uncrossed. It would have to be enough, at least for tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note for suicidal ideation/suicidal behavior, and a character denying another character's mental health struggles/accusing them of faking. Don't know how to warn for that one!
> 
> In this chapter Alfie references [a missing scene I wrote](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21486154), if you're interested.
> 
> When I started writing this last October I had no idea how long it would be or that I'd still be working on it ten months later. This is officially the longest fic I've ever written! Thank you to everyone for reading and letting me know what you think.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please see end notes for additional warnings specific to this chapter.

Wading through a mud-choked trench weren’t nothing remarkable, but this time when Alfie checked the night sky for incoming shells he caught sight of a pair of fat silver moons hung overhead, twin inscrutable mugs staring back at him. He turned, searching for a witness to confirm this fucking unusual occurance, to tell him he hadn’t lost his bloody mind at long last, and woke with a start to his smooth bedroom walls painted the familiar gold of a Margate afternoon -- late afternoon, by the hue.

Had to blink a couple times before his eye did him the courtesy of focusing. It only had the one job, his eye, especially vital now it was a solo mission, but periodically it went on strike, jealous of its layabout partner. Weren’t as if he could increase its wages any, innit, but he did give it the occasional break by sleeping in. Not usually this late in the day of course, that was just excessive. A waste. Maybe Marie’d already been by and he’d shooed her off. Wouldn’t be the first time, yeah, but usually she ignored any protests past noon and pried him out of his bed regardless of resistance on his part. Weren’t good to wallow, she’d told him early on, stay in bed long enough and you’d never leave even if you eventually wanted to.

But hell, after yesterday’s pistol-wielding aunties and wifely hauntings, he deserved to have a lie in. He was just considering whether to pull the blankets back up over his head when his ears -- always ready to do _their_ duty, weren’t they, taking up the slack for the rebellious eye -- picked up a shift of cloth and a scrape of some sort, like shoe leather on wood. When Alfie managed to push himself up a few inches in the pillows, an act which took him an alarming amount of effort, he caught a vague glimpse of something out of place just over the footboard of his bed. His eye’s focus cleared a bit more and the whatever-it-was solidified into the top curve of a familiar skull.

As if sleeping the day away weren’t unnerving enough, Tommy Shelby had apparently decided the best use of his time was watching Alfie do it. Rather than grapple with _that_ piece of information, Alfie zeroed in on a fact startling in its obviousness that had somehow previously escaped him.

“You do it yourself?” The words got mangled by the gravel that somebody had scattered in his throat while he slept and came out sputtering and grinding like the utterance of an engine on its last legs.

The skull bobbed up a bit further into view, revealing a lined forehead and two raised brows with bleary eyes under ‘em, the color of cloth that had been through the wringer so many times the tint was only a memory of blue.

“Do… what?” Tommy blinked at him, voice not much clearer than Alfie’s own had been.

His brain had caught up with his ears and eye a bit, so now it was obvious Tommy was sitting on the floor across the room from Alfie’s bed, leaning against the heavy oak wardrobe. What the hell he was doing down there was probably the question he should have been asking, right, but he felt compelled to follow his original train of thought to its conclusion.

“Well,” he said through rusty gears still in need of oil, “always thought of you as brunette, mate.”

A hand appeared and ruffled through the brush of hair that was coming in on the skull, same abbreviated length all over, still far from requiring the intervention of a barber’s razor.

“I don’t…” The skull tipped back to rest against the wall, giving Alfie a sliver of the bridge of a nose and a pair of deep-set purplish crescents under the eyes. “I should get Marie.” Didn’t budge, though, did he.

Alfie shook his head. “I can still fucking see, you know, even if I have to turn my head a bit to get the benefit of a full panorama.”

“Alfie--” Up all night ignoring his dead wife, by the looks of it, leaving him lightly scrambled.

“Haven’t had a proper mirror gaze since Bedlam, have you.” Tommy seemed to have given up processing his words completely. Just stared at him over top the footboard, a line creasing the space between his brows. It was harder to roll one’s eye, singular, than it was when there were a pair of ‘em. Shouldn’t have been, but somehow was. Didn’t have the same impact. “Just a surprise, is all. Hadn’t realized you was the type of man given to the vanity of artificially concealing the natural progression of years, hmm. So my question, Thomas, is this: do you allow your barber in on this secret knowledge, or do you take care of the matter yourself?”

The hand smoothed over the longish stubble, russet gone to ashes in the beam of late day, and then dropped out of sight.

“Jesus Christ,” Tommy muttered, eyes falling closed.

He hadn’t, Alfie couldn’t help but notice, answered the question.

“Oh, Mr. Solomons, you’re awake,” Marie said from his doorway.

And that was an obvious fucking statement, innit, so he didn’t bother with a response, struck instead by the shadows under Marie’s eyes, not quite a match to Tommy’s, but then Tommy’d had a lifetime’s head start.

“The two of you spend all night gossiping, then?”

Marie spared Tommy a quick frowning glance which the man missed, his eyes still being closed, like maybe he’d drifted off there in his spot on the floor. Then she crossed to Alfie’s bedside and gripped his nearest wrist in her hand, digging in for his pulse. “Could prop you up a bit, if you’re feeling well enough.”

He didn’t need her fucking help to sit up in his own bed. At least, he shouldn’t have, in theory, right, but seemed his theory was proving to be shit, because he couldn’t even pull his wrist out of her grasp. Whatever his pulse had told her, she didn’t seem too pleased, but she let him go and started manhandling him before he could form an objection. When she was done he was only half upright in the pillows and breathing hard, wheezing even, Tommy watching him blankly from the floor as the coughing started.

“Morphine’s on the dresser there,” Marie was saying, to Tommy it turned out, because Tommy was on his feet all of a sudden and hovering at the foot of the bed like one of his phantoms.

“Nahhh…” was all Alfie was able to manage at first, but Marie ignored him and waited for Tommy to hand her the bottle, her fingers back at Alfie’s wrist.

“There’s a pitcher of water in the kitchen. Get a clean glass,” she told Tommy, who wordlessly turned, stumbling a little as if his legs had gone numb on him. He caught himself on the door frame and then disappeared down the hall.

“Fucking quack… fucking quack’s gonna get his money’s worth tomorrow,” Alfie choked out once the spasms eased.

“Dr. RIchards was already here.” Marie dropped his wrist again, no more pleased than she’d been the first time, then brandished the morphine bottle at him.

“Don’t fucking need that.” There was pain, yeah alright he could admit that much with Tommy out of the room, but it was fading a bit already and he could still talk, so it weren’t so bad.

“Just enough to control the cough.” She poured a bit out into a spoon and he was too tired to refuse so he swallowed it.

“And when was the good doctor fucking here? Wasn’t supposed to see him ‘till Tuesday.”

There was a pause while Marie considered him, then she just plowed ahead. “It’s Wednesday today, Mr. Solomons.”

Marie weren’t the type for pranks so he tried to absorb the desertion of two and a half days and found he still didn’t fully believe it, even with the evidence of her obvious fatigue and his own weakness. Fucking hell. He didn’t ask what had happened. Weren’t sure he wanted to know quite yet, if it had been bad enough to leave Tommy Shelby hunched sentinel at the end of his bed like a storm-beaten crow.

“Hmm, right,” he said, finally. “Right, Wednesday, is it.”

He was out again before Tommy returned with the pitcher of water.

The windows had gone dark when next he opened his eyes, still propped up by his pillows, sunken into his own beard like an old man. The pair of oxen that occasionally enjoyed setting themselves down on his chest had been and gone, leaving it a pile of smashed crockery in their wake. A half-full glass of water was in easy reach on his bedside table, next to it the morphine, all lit by the quiet glow of the little lamp he sometimes used to read in bed.

Back in his corner leaning against the wardrobe, Tommy Shelby’s stillness was so complete Alfie took him at first to be asleep, so didn’t ask why, if he was going to insist on taking up space in Alfie’s fucking bedroom, he didn’t make use of the chair Marie had dragged in for just such a purpose, the chair which currently sat abandoned on the other side of his bedside table. He couldn’t make out the clock quite yet but it didn’t seem too late, not that his sense of time was trustworthy. Fuck, last thing he’d known it’d been fucking Sunday, hadn’t it, and now it was nearly Thursday. A chunk of time this large hadn’t gone missing on him since he’d taken the bullet to his face. This must’ve been what Tommy’d felt on learning January’d gone and skipped his station while he’d been in Bedlam, hmm. No wonder he’d expelled what little he'd had in his stomach when confronted with the fact, it was a nauseating realization.

Alfie reached for the water glass, grateful it hadn’t been filled to the top so didn’t slosh any when he fumbled it a bit. Heavy for its size, weren’t it, like it was cast in lead. The water was ambrosia so he drank it down in one go and when he settled back in the pillows he found eyes glinting at him in the lamplight like a wolf caught at the edge of a treeline.

“Don’t you have newspapers to plunder?” Alfie groused.

“Library’s closed.”

“And that’s stopping you?” He tsked, ignoring the way his own voice wavered in and out like a bad radio signal. “Wouldn’t have to tunnel your way in this time, no blasting cap required, just a good lockpick and five minutes solid effort. Don’t even have a guard, the library.”

Tommy’s head tilted to the side a little, temple resting against the wardrobe. “Do the roentgen treatments make a difference?”

He was too weary for what boiled up from his belly to find any outlet beyond words. “She wants you to join her, right, your wife? Join her in the afterlife. That’s what she says when she talks to you, innit.”

Whatever flickered over Tommy’s face found no foothold in his tone, which was dry as the newspapers he weren’t stealing. “My wife’s in Warwickshire, far as I know, and I’ve no fucking idea what she wants.”

“Bullshit,” Alfie said. “You said you was dead, yeah, dead before you got to Bedlam, so where’d it happen, your death?”

“Which one?” There was a bottle in Tommy’s hand and he swallowed around the pull he took from it before he spoke again. “I’ve fucking lost count.”

A clink as he set the bottle down on the floor next to him. Alfie hadn’t seen a label and wouldn’t have been able to read it if he had, but it’d looked to be colourless, whatever it was he was drinking. The faint whiff of pine on him Sunday night -- course it’d been gin. Tommy and his fucking gin. Probably brought it back with him after his last trip to the library, only mystery was how he’d procured it, in his current penniless state. Before Alfie could let another shot fly, Tommy spoke again.

“Third time was the tunnel. Second time was Flanders. Caught in-- caught in fucking no man’s land.” The bottle lifted again and Alfie could hear the booze spreading beneath the words now he knew it was there. No way he’d be talking about fucking Flanders without it.

Caught in the wasteland between razor wire and Lewis gun, shrapnel raining down on you -- it was every soldier’s nightmare. Well, one of ‘em anyhow. Not like there weren’t any number of others to choose from. Part of him wanted to continue his jabs, satisfy the lingering rage at the question about the fucking magic rays he paid a frankly insane amount to have shot through his body in the interests of advancing science more than any hope of a cure. But even ten years after the fighting had stopped -- more than ten years now, weren’t it -- he found he couldn’t interrupt a man once he’d started this kind of tale. The kind you didn’t speak of to no one who hadn’t been there. The kind you didn’t speak of at all if you could help it. And when the time came another man _couldn’t_ help it no more, you had the respect to at least fucking listen.

“You were on your own?” he prodded.

“At first. Woke up in a crater, with--” Tommy cleared his throat. “Rats gnawing what was left. Thought I was one of them, stuck under a pile of ‘em in the mud, how could the rats tell any different, eh? Wasn’t their fault.”

Alfie clamped down on a shudder. Not as if he’d forgotten, no forgetting the feel of the fucking things skittering over your legs when you was curled up in a dugout trying to pluck a minute’s rest from between shell bursts, but he’d chosen not to remember the rats. The fucking rats, stealing the food out their mouths while they ate it, fat from raiding the dead. Still had nightmares about the things crawling over him while he slept, little twitchy noses, the fucking teeth--

“Yeah,” Tommy said into the silence Alfie hadn’t realized had fallen, both of them caught up with the same train of thought. Tommy rubbed at one of his arms then dug his fingers into the meat of his shoulder. “I’d been shot, though I didn’t know it, didn’t remember what the fuck had happened after we’d gone over the top. Must’ve been a shell. I was pinned and the sun went down and it’s raining and I recognize one of the lads from my unit a couple feet away. Wasn’t… some of him’s missing but I can’t see much, all I know is the rats are at him and one of my arms is free, so I… I toss whatever I can reach at ‘em. Screaming at ‘em. Don’t notice he isn’t moving, that his guts are mixed in with the mud.”

His hands might’ve been steady on the bottle, but the way the shadows fell his eyes were empty holes as if the rats had already cleaned them from their sockets.

“Kept nodding off or… blacking out, I guess, and when I did the bloody rats were back at me, so I figure they must know more than I do and I… the rain keeps coming down, filling up the crater until I can’t see much. It was to my breastbone before Jeremiah found me.”

“Fuck,” Alfie breathed. The name was vaguely familiar, but he didn’t press. “How long were you there, in the hole?”

“Don’t fucking know. They’d called a retreat but…” Tommy shifted, head tilted back, watching something on the ceiling. “It was before they split us up. Jeremiah and Arthur and-- and John and Freddie and Danny Whizz Bang, they stayed behind. John‘d-- John hears me screaming at the fucking rats, won’t fucking leave. They come for me, crawling on their bellies through the mud, Germans picking off anything that moves. I wasn’t-- by time they got to the crater I was dead, or convinced I was. Thought they were dead as well.”

The house creaked around them, walls settling in for the night. The ache in Alfie’s chest was a distant thing, bruised fruit now rather than a mess of shards, though he still couldn’t take in a half-decent breath without smothering the impulse to cough.

“So that was the second time,” Tommy said after a moment had passed, a long empty moment. “Third time was the tunnel, but you’ve heard that story.”

He hadn’t, not beyond Tommy’s dry-bones invocation of it while he toyed with his prop grenade pin. Buried alive, right, under tonnes of French dirt, genesis of Tommy’s habit of digging himself out of his own grave.

“What was the first?”

Tommy’s head tipped forward to level a cool impenetrability at him over the footboard. “The first what?”

Half the bottle was gone far as Alfie could see with his one blurry eye, though it was impossible to determine whether that was the labour of several nights or the result of this specific evening’s exertion. If he was still taking Marie’s tablets the difference could prove fateful, couldn’t it. Alfie was working his way up to an interrogation on the matter when Tommy sat forward, bottle dangling between his knees, a distinct air of recrimination about him.

“You planned it all.”

Alfie scratched at his beard, aware all at once that he’d most likely been in this bed, in the same twisted sheets and sweat stained nightshirt, for three days. Didn’t smell too rank, which was an embarrassment in itself, because it meant Marie’d most likely given him a sponge bath at some point.

“Plenty of plans in my time, not all of ‘em worth carrying out. Which one you referring to, mate?”

“The fight,” Tommy bit off, liquor clipping his tongue where it might make another man slur. “The beach.”

Not much to go on, was it, but then there was only one thing he could be after. Alfie supposed he deserved whatever was coming, even three years on, but didn’t mean he had to be happy about it. Couldn’t’ve taken Tommy this long to come to this realization, could it? Maybe if it’d been somebody else, sure, but this was Tommy and he’d’ve figured it out before he even set foot on the fucking sand that day. So the question was, why bring it up now?

Tommy’s knuckles were white around the neck of the bottle. “You knew about the cancer. Before you--”

“Made my deal with the Americans?” He’d fucking said as much. Hadn’t been able to face Tommy straight on while he’d said it, sure, but something had compelled him to honesty that morning when Tommy refused to get it over with like a good lad and just fucking shoot him. “I did, yeah.”

No use pretending. No use making excuses. He’d done what he’d done, hadn’t he, and he’d thought he’d been fair and given Tommy a good reason. Couldn’t even say he wouldn’t do the same again given the opportunity, which was a silly mental exercise, weren’t it, a waste of time, because there was no going back.

“That night at the arena, fucking big fucks small. You could’ve--” Tommy’s throat bobbed with another swallow of gin, his eyes glazed with gut-deep guilt, and that-- Alfie thought he’d ventured down this road to air some sort of lingering grievance, right, but whatever his intentions the finger he’d started off pointing at Alfie seemed to have curled back towards himself. “They nearly killed my brother.”

“Hmm.” Was the issue that he hadn’t caught on quick enough to stop the Italians or that Alfie’d set that ball rolling in the first place?

“If I hadn’t come, if Changretta had won, would you have retired, or…”

Or done the job himself? Maybe Tommy didn’t recall their conversation the night of the fever, maybe he’d been too far gone by then. Maybe Alfie hadn’t ever said it outright, the logic behind the details of his scheme. “Well. Didn’t plan for that contingency, did I--”

“You knew I’d come.” The bottle thunked to the floorboards between his feet. “Knew I’d do it for you.”

He’d arranged things best he could, sold his fucking empire, scanned the papers for news Changretta’s brains had been splattered over some Small Heath wall. And when the time came for the mousetrap to snap shut -- Tommy Shelby with his gun aimed at Alfie’s own head -- Tommy’d refused to bloody take the cheese. Begging Alfie to fucking look at him. It’d been the warehouse after his kid was snatched all over again, Tommy making shit personal that should’ve been cut and dried, a matter of simple business. Like they fucking _owed_ each other something.

“Memory serves you didn’t.” Alfie’d been consumed with one furious thought -- _after everything, the_ _bastard’s not gonna fucking do it_ \-- before he’d taken matters in hand. “Had to press the issue.”

“Said you wanted it to be there.” Tommy gestured vaguely towards the windows, which faced the road to Margate rather than the shore. His consonants had sharpened to a precise edge even as the Birmingham in him deepened with the booze. “On the beach.”

Kept circling back to the fucking beach, Tommy, and Alfie’s patience had ebbed with the morphine. “Blue sky, sea breeze. Seemed a decent place for a man’s last view of this Earth.”

“So you picked the spot, set it all in motion. Even bought this fucking house.”

Whatever had happened after Sunday night -- and Alfie supposed he could guess easily enough based on the experience of the last few years and the insistent tickle in his chest -- he was truly fucking tired. “What’re you asking, Tommy?”

Tommy pulled his pack of smokes out of his trouser pocket, snagged one from the rest and stuck it in his mouth, then failed to produce his matchbox.

“I was meant to be on fucking holiday,” he muttered around the unlit cigarette.

Alfie’d never taken one himself, at least not prior to his retirement. “Could’ve stuck around afterwards, you know. Has its attractions, Margate--”

Tommy barrelled on, cigarette dangling from his lips, and there was obviously something eating at him, right, but he was taking his fucking time getting round to it. “Supposed to be on holiday and first thing I did, the _first thing_\--”

“Dunno what you’re whinging about. Got a dog out of it.”

A choked sound escaped him. He plucked the cigarette away and rubbed at his mouth with the knuckles of one hand. “A dog,” he echoed, derailed. “A fucking dog.”

“Yeah, a great fucking dog, Cyril.” Alfie folded his hands over his chest. “A _king_ among dogs.”

The lamplight had softened the cliffs of Tommy’s cheekbones and the tight-wound line of his jaw. “Went home afterwards--”

“Taking my dog with you--”

“--and I tried my hand at golf.”

“Did you.” Alfie couldn’t picture it, Tommy Shelby on a putting green. “How respectable. Did you don the traditional attire? Plaid knickers and all?”

Chin lifting, unblinking, gin-flushed and deadpan. “Yeah.”

“Hmm, yeah, ‘course.”

“Didn’t take to it, golf. Wasn’t any better at catching fish. Too much-- too much fucking silence, eh.” An ironic flavor of bitterness had crept in. “Had the bright idea to give politics a go, instead.”

“Obviously. Much more relaxing pastime, public office.” All this chattering was drying out Alfie’s throat, left scraped raw by his misplaced time. He reached for his water glass and took a tentative sip, wary of sparking off the hacking again. “So why you?”

“Why me.” Flat. Almost a challenge, as if he knew exactly what Alfie’d intended and had a wholly different aim in mind. The question he hadn’t asked on the beach. The question he wouldn’t fucking ask now.

“Mosley approached you to join him. Be his second.”

“Alfie--” Tommy shifted in his spot on the floor, gripping one of his knees. Bloody Catholics. How long had he been sitting there on the hard wood like some kind of penitent? If it’d been Alfie, he’d have never been able to stand again. If it’d been Alfie, he would have used the fucking chair. “It’s late, you’re--”

“Humor a bedridden old man in his boredom, Thomas.”

Mouth pressed in an unamused line, Tommy found something across the room to occupy his attention. Weren’t nothing over there besides the scattered flotsam on Alfie’s dresser, discarded days ago. Watch and watch chain, the little lens he sometimes wore, a couple strands of beads. Eventually Tommy pressed a thumb into his eye socket and gave a short nod and started up again, faltering at first as if the effort it took to get all his gears working so the words would come out might be too great. Swallowed some lubricant and had another go at it.

“Wanted to make use of me. They all fucking--” Gestured with his forgotten cigarette, a jerky, dramatic flourish Alfie weren’t sure how to read. “I provide ‘em with tools they won’t avail themselves of directly. A specific expertise.”

“Uh-huh. So which of these tools did Mosely want from you?”

“Crowd control.”

Right. “Beatings, you mean. Mob violence.”

“Hmm.” One of his shoulders lifted, casually dismissive, his mouth twisting. “And fucking… _legitimacy_, I suppose. With the people.”

“Right, yeah, man of the people hmm, come up from the streets and all that, a baronet can’t give ‘em that.” Alfie’s eye weren’t cooperating enough to catch the nuances of Tommy’s countenance, across the room and dimly lit as it was, but the general attitude of derision gave him away. The only uncertainty lay in the target of said derision: himself, the people, or Mosley. Seemed he had enough to spare for everyone involved. “Your aunt, you know, she seemed convinced you was aiming at Downing Street.”

Tommy went still in his corner, jaw set, then shook his head. Whether meant as a denial of the accusation itself or the memory of it was unclear, weren’t it. And while nothing revealed so far suggested it’d been his primary motivation, Alfie wouldn’t put it past him to reap a side-benefit to Mosley’s assassination that served his own personal ambitions. Nothing Tommy took on had anything as limited as a single anticipated payoff, did it, he was too much an artist of chaos for that; but what he’d do with the opportunity if it fell into his lap was an entirely different fucking question.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content note for cancer and drinking and discussion of past suicide attempt, as well as uh... reference to gore involving rats and corpses.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone reading and commenting!


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please see end notes for additional warnings specific to this chapter.

Nobody having done the job of informing the sun of his newly fucking incapacitated state, a bright and inescapably cheerful light was stealing in around the curtains to assault him when next Alfie pulled himself from a thick and uneasy sleep. Before he could do more than shut his eye against it and grumble around the cough waiting to erupt -- a beast in his chest coiled and ready to spring the moment his attention faltered -- Marie had bustled her way into the room without bothering to knock. Threw open the curtains and windows both, going on about airing out the room, which he’d never admit aloud was a dire necessity, stale and sour as it’d become over the days he’d been trapped here.

And what did the open window bring him but the greeting of the gulls, out of his fucking reach and revelling in it, the buggers. Five minutes of their taunting and he was ready to beg Marie to shove his bed under the window and bring him his revolver. Marie was capable of greater feats than you’d expect from a woman of her size, but moving the bed with him still in it would require Tommy’s help, wouldn’t it, so that idea was out.

Marie puttered about the room setting things in some kind of order while leaving everything exactly as it’d already been, then hauled him upright in his pillows and brought him a tray with a breakfast of thinned porridge, which he glared at but shoveled down nonetheless. As he finished the tasteless stuff and started on a cup of tea a muffled voice drifted in from down the hall, Tommy carrying on one side of a stilted conversation. Given Marie was still in his room and it was daylight, Alfie gathered he was in the office on the telephone, which was a new development, right. Whoever he was talking to it didn’t last long and Alfie couldn’t make anything out, which somehow aggravated him even more than the gulls.

After he’d finished his gruel and tea and Marie’d cleared the tray away she laid him out for a massage. The shift in position let loose the beast, dragging barking spasms from him until he spit up something thick and nearly solid into the kerchief Marie pressed into his hand.

“Fuuuuck,” Alfie rasped when the coughing fit passed.

Marie just gave him a frown and topped him off with morphine and the itch in his chest subsided a bit, enough to let her dig into his flesh, the days in bed having left his muscles stiff and joints aching and all his tendons shrunk. After she finished he dozed a bit, and when he startled awake on another cough, Tommy was perched next to his bed in one of the wooden chairs from the kitchen, a purloined library book on his knees.

“Still on ol’Freddie, are you?”

A startled confusion flooded Tommy’s face as he looked up from his reading, then he seemed to catch on and shook his head. “Oswald Spengler.”

“Hm. Never heard of him.”

Tommy bent over the volume. “_For us, however_,” he read, with the stiff tone of a pupil suddenly called on to recite, “_whom a Destiny has placed in this culture and at this moment of its development--the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step--our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living._”

He paused, frowning down at the page, like maybe he had an opinion about the words he thought better to keep to himself.

_“We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that,_” he continued, _“but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him_.”

“Right,” Alfie said, as Tommy dog-eared the page and shut the book. “Right. Destiny, is it.”

One of Tommy’s shoulders lifted, then he set the book aside on Alfie’s bedside table.

“Any further thought on how you’ll bring your Oswald _his_ destiny?”

“No.” If it was a lie Alfie couldn’t tell. Had to be, didn’t it, reading material like that. Not something he’d picked for the time-killing enjoyment of it, yeah.

“Gathering your troops, hm, sending out your orders already?”

“Orders?”

“Radio here only goes the one way, but I got a telephone, don’t I, which comes in handy when plotting from afar.”

Tommy blinked at him mildly from behind his glasses. “I wouldn’t know.”

Pneumonia again, Marie’d told him as she worked his joints. Fever’d baked his brain while his lungs rebelled, no wonder the days had escaped him. Scattered moments kept returning to him here and there, nothing solid or coherent, just blurred faces and misery. One image landed in his lap now: Tommy and Marie arguing as the doctor bent over him, none of their words clear enough to make out.

Fucking hell. Tommy mulling over _historic necessity_ and him barely able to sit up straight in his fucking pillows. The bastard wasn’t going to tell him shit now, was he. Probably had his brother stockpiling an arsenal, casing Mosley’s London office and wherever the fuck he lived.

“So why’re you still fucking here, then,” Alfie demanded, humiliation doubling down into fury when it came out brittle.

Tommy stilled. “Alfie--”

“Yeah? What.” Tommy didn’t have nothing more to say, so he lifted a hand to shoo him away. “Fuck off.”

“Alright,” Tommy said, and stood.

Alfie’s hand dropped back to the blankets, already beat and pissed off about it and too weary to sustain it as Tommy’s back vanished out the bedroom door.

The other Oswald’s book was still on his table, so after he’d got bored staring off into space he picked it up and flipped through the pages, but even with his spectacles the words blurred and melted together and he tossed it aside in disgust. Three years he’d been here and if until recently every day’d followed the same path, well, it’d been a comfortable one, hadn’t it. No claws buried in his chest, no assassination schemes down the hall, no talk of destiny. Just the freedom to do nothing and enjoy it, right, like a retired man fucking deserved.

Mid-day came and went and with it a bowl of chicken and dumplings, the solid bits in the broth evidence Marie thought he was on the mend. A nap took up the afternoon, then Marie brought him his tea. Voices rose and fell somewhere in the house, Marie and Tommy by the sounds of it, in a more extended exchange than he’d ever witnessed. Then silence, then the door to the outside world shutting, then silence again. Marie wouldn’t take off with Alfie bedridden unless she hired in a replacement and she would have told him about it first, so the door meant somebody arriving or Tommy leaving. And since there came no other voices, familiar or not, a visitor seemed unlikely.

Fueled by food and boredom, restlessness set in and overpowered his pride, driving him to peel the blankets back and work his way upright. Seemed no more trouble than usual, so he scooted off the mattress until his bare feet hit the floor and levered himself standing, at which time his halved vision grayed around the edges and his pulse galloped ahead of him as if it’d heard the starting pistol. Never knew seasickness to be a symptom of pneumonia, you know, but here it was, yeah, waves bucking under the floorboards. And just like that he was arse over tip.

Marie must’ve been nearby and heard the tumble because before he could do more than curse and cough she was there, helping him back into the bed, scolding him all the while.

“You’re a stubborn fool, Alfie Solomons,” she said as he nursed his bruised knees and wounded manhood. “Rather fall on your face than ring the bell I left you. What is it you were hoping to accomplish?” When he just glowered at her she went on. “If you need entertaining I’ll send Mr. Shelby back in,” she said, guessing the truth he’d refused to give.

“Not here to send in, is he?” he groused.

Marie pursed her lips. “Is that what this is about?”

“Not about anything, innit, other than a man’s right to stand unmolested in his own fucking house.”

“And now you’ve discovered your body hasn’t yet granted you that right, hmm? If you feel up to a change of scene, I’ll get the chair for you.” Then, at his face: “Sulking is for children. You saw the man at his lowest, you can tolerate him seeing you in a bloody wheelchair.”

Which was how he ended up more or less properly dressed and in his sitting room, four days after his last trip outside his bedroom. Tommy weren’t there to witness Marie wheel him out and after a spate of fierce bickering she agreed to help him to the couch, but she left the wheelchair nearby so how he’d got to where he was would be obvious enough to an unobservant man. Marie draped a rug over his knees and flicked on the radio and finally let him be.

A pensive tune filled the room, strings climbing high then drifting low, horns murmuring underneath, then everything falling to a hush. Bit too romantically melancholic for his tastes, the single violin like a plaintive child in the sudden quiet. Halfway through the movement Tommy appeared in the front hall in his coat and cap, wrapped in the distracted air of a man whose mind was occupied elsewhere. The music fell quiet again as Tommy put away his things and ventured into the room, giving Alfie a nod but not interrupting the last embers of the song. His gaze took in the wheelchair and then moved on as he absently patted his trouser pockets and came up with a shiny new cigarette case, flipped the thing open, then hesitated, clicking it shut. Took a seat in his armchair as the last notes of the symphony drew their final breath and faded away.

“Don’t let me stop you,” Alfie said, after the announcer came on to ruin the moment for everyone by explaining what they’d just heard, as if they didn’t have ears.

“From?” Now he was clearly avoiding looking at the wheelchair, and that just riled Alfie up further.

“Sucking down your smoke.”

But the second news had started, giving Tommy an excuse not to reply. “And tonight, prayers for former American president William Howard Taft, whose declining health led him to resign his post as chief justice on the third of February. Doctors say he isn’t expected--”

“Shut it off,” Alfie grumbled. Tommy failed to make any move towards the radio, knowing full fucking well by the presence of the wheelchair that chances were Alfie couldn’t make it across the room do to it himfuckingself. “Dunno why they think it’s anything we here in Britain care one whit about, yeah, what happens to some American bloke.”

“Good to see you up and about, Alfie,” Tommy said then.

And that was too fucking much. “I see you’ve been accessorizing, Thomas.” Besides the cigarette case, Tommy was decked out in close to his old fussy style: starched collar, new gold collar stud, simple matching cufflinks at his wrists. No pocket watch and watch chain adorned his waistcoat; must’ve been partial to the one he’d left behind for Bedlam. Secondary as it was, how he’d managed to acquire these embellishments ate at Alfie underneath everything else. “Meet anyone interesting tonight?”

The corner of Tommy’s mouth turned up. “Can’t say I did.”

Recovered most of his smug inscrutability along with his fashionable trimmings while Alfie’d been stuck in bed, hadn’t he. “Been thinking, mate.”

“Dangerous of you.”

“Thinking about your riot, right. Over and above the fee they earned my men enjoyed themselves, you know, and I recalled that Ollie, see, Ollie’d told me--”

Tommy slid his hand into his trouser pocket again and pulled out the silver case. Contemplated the contents it held and plucked one out. “Mm-hmm,” he uttered from around an unlit cigarette as he returned the case to his pocket.

“Ollie said people’ve been talking, in Camden Town. Some of the local groups were already getting together and making plans.”

“Good thing to have, plans,” Tommy said, non-committal, as he stood and drifted to the balcony doors.

“You fucking listening to what I’m telling you, here?” Alfie snapped.

“I am,” Tommy said, “I am.” But he’d already stepped out into the balcony and shut the doors behind him before Alfie could get in another word. Alfie could just see him through the glass, the flare of orange as he lit up, then he turned away and dissolved into the night.

At first Friday seemed to be shaping up to be much the same as the day before. Porridge a bit thicker, tea a bit stronger, gulls still mocking from beyond his reach. He’d only lasted a pair of hours upright in the sitting room the previous evening, but this being a new day Alfie was determined not to spend it in his sickbed. His lengthy consideration of the merits of debasing himself enough to ring Marie to wheel him out on the balcony for some sun was interrupted by the intrusion of indistinct voices from out in the sitting room.

A few measures of Tommy’s deeper tone, answered by an unfamiliar pitch. A woman, and not Marie. His sister, looking to drag him home? The aunt with her rage and her revolver, back for another go at forcing a name from him? Some shopgirl who’d caught him lifting cufflinks in Margate?

There was only one thing to do now, yeah, and the wheelchair was right fucking out.

He made it upright with less drama this time, head swimming a bit before it settled, heart still taking off like a panicked pony, the urge to start hacking building like steam in a kettle before it dissipated. Somebody had left his cane leant up against the wardrobe, so he held on to the footboard of his bed to prevent a tumble before he could reach it then somehow got himself into the trousers and wrinkled shirt he’d worn the night before, left conveniently draped on the chair near his bed.

He’d have to be clever if he was to avoid being noticed. Allow a coughing fit to catch root and he’d lose his advantage -- everybody still thought him tucked up in his bed. So he eased himself down the hallway, making use of his sharpest sense which also happened to be the most useful in this particular situation: his ears.

Now he was closer the tension in the voices became clear. Another few steps and he could make out the words.

“Ada said I should leave you alone.” Not the sister, then. Not the aunt, neither. “That you’d be back in your own time.”

Silence. Then came Tommy’s reply, almost disinterested. “So why didn’t you?”

A shifting of cloth and then instead of an answer, an ambush of a question, detachedly curious. “Are you fucking him?”

The fever must’ve been taking another shot at him because Alfie felt as if he’d walked face-first into a wall of heat. Who the bloody hell _was_ this?

“No.” Not the least bit shocked, Tommy. Not even affronted, yeah, just matter of fact.

When he failed to rise to the provocation, the other voice moved on without comment. “Had a visitor at the house yesterday. Looking for you.”

Alfie was nearly to the doorway to the sitting room now, in danger of discovery should Marie come out of the kitchen, where he could just hear her banging around, maybe putting tea together for Tommy’s guest.

Something trickled into Tommy’s voice at last, a thin note of impatience. “Who was it, Lizzie?”

So this was the second wife, the corporeal one. Alfie supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised but he was, somehow. He risked a glimpse round the corner.

For once Tommy was sat on Alfie’s couch, one arm spread along the back, posture open and seemingly relaxed if you didn’t notice the line of his jaw. His missus stood in Tommy’s usual place by the balcony doors, tall and slim and dressed for travelling in a neat suit with cinched belt at the waist, nothing like the blonde sylph who’d haunted the grand staircase in Tommy’s big house last Alfie’d been there. They was startlingly alike, Tommy and his second wife, same sheer-cliff cheekbones and cool, regal austerity. Alfie’d never met the lass in person, though he’d spoke to her on the phone any number of times back when she’d been Tommy’s secretary. Had she been his mirror-image before they’d married, Lizzie Shelby, or had it developed from self-defense?

When she didn’t answer Tommy repeated his question and she swept an assessing, wary scrutiny over him before she replied.

“Winston Churchill.”

Of fucking course.

Whether he’d made a sound or just had the bad luck of being in her eyeline when she happened to glance away from Tommy, Alfie found himself under a sudden chilly surveillance, scanned head to foot. No sense in retreating now, was there. Tommy’s head came round so quickly it might’ve been comical if they wasn’t dancing along the border of a minefield. As Alfie limped his way into the room, gripping the head of his cane like a lifeline, Tommy made like he meant to give up his seat, drawing a frown of hostile surprise from his wife.

“Nah, mate, don’t bother.” Alfie waved him off and collapsed into the armchair opposite him, relieved to be off his feet, which was fucking pitiful, right, short trip as it’d been. “Churchill was it?”

The silence that followed his entrance was a mutually rancorous one, but whether that might be due to his interruption or the impact of the news she’d carried was beyond him.

“Tom,” Lizzie Shelby said finally, turning back to her husband. “This man. Can he-- can he be trusted with--”

And that was just too much, weren’t it. “Trust? Trust? Do I have this right, hmm, you realize this is _my_ house you’re in, yeah, and you doubt whether _I _can be trusted, _in_ _my own fucking house_\--”

“Already knows most of it,” Tommy broke in, with a shrug that was far from casual.

“_Most_ of it?” Alfie pointed his cane at Tommy. “After giving you sanctuary here, sanctuary from the fucking seagulls and any other pests seeking to pluck out those pretty eyes, I only fucking know _most_ of it?”

The exchange fortified the ramparts of his wife’s face. “Oh, this is rich. You’ll talk to the man who’s _sold you out_ more times than I can count before you’ll tell--”

“Jesus Christ,” Tommy sighed, scrubbing at his face. He dropped his hands and planted his elbows on his knees, ignoring Alfie to shoot her a glare. “Lizzie, just-- what did he want?”

Arms crossed over her chest, she hesitated, whether from stubbornness or lingering suspicion of Alfie. “You told Winston bloody Churchill what you were up to before your own fucking wife. I had to find out from the radio. And then--”

Tommy had gone rigid. “What did he fucking say?”

They stared each other down, and it was bloody tiring, weren’t it, all this drama. Alfie was about to open his mouth to deflate the moment when she relented.

“Nothing. He didn’t say a thing to me. Came looking for you, and when I said you were on holiday he left. But it was clear what he was after, that he knew something had happened. Knew you weren’t on holiday, knew about your stupid _suicidal_ plan.”

Tommy’d recovered a bit by then, gone maddingly blank once more as he leant back against the cushions. “Didn’t fucking tell him anything,” he said. “He guessed.”

As if she should have been able to do so herself.

“That’s all any of us can ever do, guess. Fucking guess while you-- We had to guess what you’d want after you left, it’s been nothing but guessing since you left it all hanging. It isn’t a bloody business, it’s one man’s private battlefield, isn’t it, and like a good general you never confide your _plans_ to your fucking underlings.”

From what Alfie’d gathered it weren’t more than he deserved, right, but the mute vacancy with which he took it was troubling given the past few weeks. If his wife had noticed it didn’t stop her from pressing on as if a dam had given way.

“When you keep everything to yourself no one knows how to proceed in your absence, Tommy. You left an opening and Michael made his fucking move. Took over the opium business while you were away. Said it was what you’d wanted.”

Tommy didn’t shift, didn’t even blink. “Away.”

“In Bedlam,” Lizzie Shelby said, defiant. “Getting help.”

Tommy’s head had tilted as if he was merely curious, but queasy dregs lingered underneath his words. “I suppose that was your idea, Bedlam.”

She’d gone pale, but stood her ground. “No, it was your fucking doctor’s. You were--”

“But you made the call.” The grandfather clock ticked away the silence before Tommy spoke again. “Told ‘em how things had been.”

“Yeah. I did.” The fight had drained from her, leaving behind the exposed timbers of a house battered by a hundred-year storm. “Ada and I discussed our options, but as your wife, it came down to me.”

“Protecting your assets.”

“If that’d been what I was after, I’d have left you to fucking get on with it.” Hurt flared under the bravado. “As executor of your estate it would have saved me a hell of alot of trouble with bloody Michael.”

Tommy’s fingers dug into the arm of the couch and he took in air and let it go with the deliberate rhythm of a machine before he went on. “And how is Michael taking to the throne?”

“Like a cock of the walk. Running distribution though his in-laws in America. Got his eye on the legitimate business, now.”

Tommy’s focus had drifted, sunken inward, but at least it hadn’t sought out the phantom of his first wife. Would have been fucking awkward, that, wives living and dead in the same bloody room.

Lulled by his initial air of aloof normalcy it had taken her longer than his previous two visitors, but at last his wife seemed shaken by the odd thread in his demeanor. “Tommy--”

He cleared his throat and gave a little nod as if to himself. “Let him have it.”

“You can’t be serious. After he lost everything in Chicago?”

Tommy roused, on firmer footing. “It’s all… you and the children are protected. The accounting is separate, whatever he fucks up he can’t touch--”

“So you’ve thought about them in all of this, have you?” He hadn’t once mentioned his kids, the entire time he’d been at Margate. “They wanted to know where you were at first, you know. They were worried.”

The next words tore from him as if against his will. “And now?”

“They’ve stopped asking.”

A terrible smile rose like some kind of beast from his depths, never quite breaking the surface. Alfie found himself wishing for a return of the blankness.

His wife shifted, hugging herself again, but forged on. Had courage, that one. “Johnny’s been more of a father to them these past few months than--”

Before Alfie knew what was happening Tommy was on his feet and across the room and had clutched his wife’s shoulders in both hands, pressing her back against the balcony door.

“Keep them the _fuck_ away from him. Do you hear me?” His knuckles were white, tendons standing out in his wrists, Lizzie Shelby’s mouth still open on a startled gasp.

“Jesus, Tommy--”

“Lizzie,” he shook her a little. “Do you fucking hear me?”

Wrenching out of his grip, she rubbed at one of her shoulders, eyes gone wide. “Yes, yes I hear you. What the fuck, Tom. What is going _on_.”

He’d dropped his hands and backed away a step and his chest was fluttering under his shirt and waistcoat, about three seconds from coming apart completely if Alfie was any judge.

“I need to--” He broke off as if the breath had been choked from him. Fucking hell. “I need to f-fucking--”

“Tommy,” Alfie said, a thousand times more airily than he felt. “Sit down, yeah?”

After a moment that lasted ten years Tommy stumbled backwards and dropped onto the couch, Lizzie Shelby’s eyes following him in confusion.

“Tom--” She fell silent at the stare Alfie lobbed her way.

They could both hear Tommy’s half-smothered gasping as his attention darted around the room like an escaped prisoner cornered by the coppers.

“You need me to call Marie?” Alfie asked eventually, forcing back the urge to cough, always waiting to swoop down on him at the worst fucking time.

Tommy shook his head, rubbing at one leg, wrinkling his trousers.

“How about you get some air,” Alfie suggested. “Take a walk on the beach, hmm, let me get acquainted with your lovely wife.”

Tommy didn’t respond, just kept digging the heel of his hand into his thigh. He’d done this before, Alfie realized; done it a couple of times in fact, as if the place where they’d stuck him in Bedlam still pained him weeks later.

“You want me to call for Marie?” Nothing. “Tommy.”

He took a shaky inhalation and then cleared his throat. “No.”

“Alright.” And then they waited, his wife hovering uncertainly by the balcony doors while like the tide going out, Tommy’s panic subsided. When it was over he crumpled a little into the cushions, face and throat shining damply in the bright late-morning light.

“Christ,” he muttered.

“Don’t think the bloke’s got much to do with any of this shit, has he,” Alfie said, and Lizzie Shelby let out an overstrung laugh. “Right, I dunno about you lot, but I could use some tea.”

So for the first time in years he used one of the bells Marie’d left on every flat surface in the house for its intended fucking purpose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content note for cancer, pneumonia, panic attack, and reference to past involuntary institutionalization.
> 
> The text Tommy quotes from is _The Decline of the West_ by Oswald Spengler.
> 
> The music Alfie listens to is the [fourth movement of Mahler's 9th Symphony.](https://open.spotify.com/track/0EZewgUIPXEY3zsc6vRFTx)
> 
> Probably one more chapter? But things always run longer than I anticipate so don't hold me to that. Thank you to everyone reading and to everyone who's let me know what you think!


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **If in doubt please do check the warnings specific to this chapter in the end notes. They are spoilery but this chapter comes with content warnings for a reason.**
> 
> Thanks to takingoffmyshoes and ouroboros_ontology for taking a look at this chapter before posting, I really appreciated the feedback.
> 
> I was obviously wrong about this being the last chapter! There will be a couple more.

As if they’d sworn a bloody pact nobody brought up the past minute’s drama while Marie served them tea in the fancy gold-rimmed company set, the one with all them flowers, suitable for female company. And if Tommy’s teacup rattled against the saucer where he’d rested it on his knee, well, nobody took notice of that neither. So they was lulled into a false peace about it all, right, Tommy sipping his tea whilst Lizzie asked politely impersonal questions about the house as if she were a politician’s wife calling on a recently made acquaintance. Which Alfie supposed weren’t so far from the truth, if you ignored a few small details.

First clue the storm hadn’t blown past without leaving hidden wreckage behind should have come when Tommy’s wife took a seat as Marie carried in her tray. Weren’t much room for two on the couch, but room enough for a married couple, right. But when Lizzie Shelby perched herself on the cushion next to her husband, her arm brushing his, her thigh pressed up against him, Tommy went rigid and then shifted until a good inch of free air opened between them.

Alfie watched her notice, watched her toss Tommy a baffled glance, but she didn’t say nothing about it and she didn’t try to close the gap. Just thanked Marie and pulled another bullshit question nobody cared to hear the answer to from the air to fill the silence. It struck Alfie then, seeing them side by side, that Tommy’s wife had a good few inches on him. Tall for a woman, Lizzie Shelby. Gave her a queenly air, the height, emphasized by the hard-bought dignity in the way she held her head.

After a couple volleys more of useless talk, she took a breath and turned to Tommy again. “What was all that about, then?” she demanded. “Keep Johnny away from the kids? Why?”

Tommy didn’t do nothing so obvious as freeze up, not any more than he’d already done. He just didn’t acknowledge she’d spoken at all. Should have been the second clue, that. Given whatever had happened before Tommy landed in Bedlam chances were slim his wife had never witnessed his cornered animal routine, yeah, which threw into question what she thought might happen if she kept pushing him like this so soon after the last upheaval. Maybe she’d done up the numbers and was balancing risk with reward. And maybe Alfie hadn’t stopped her because he was curious to hear the answer as well.

“Tom?”

After another silent moment he roused, staring at some point on the wall behind Alfie’s head, his words coming low and strained. “Just-- for once in your life, listen to me and do as I fucking ask.”

“As if I ever do anything else.” She’d bristled up like a housecat, whether from his lack of an answer or his refusal to face her when he gave it. “They’re camped down by the river, what do you expect me to do, drive them off? What am I supposed to--”

“I don’t fucking care how you do it, just keep him, keep him the fuck away from Charlie and Ruby.” Hunched over his teacup, elbow propped on one knee, he pressed his knuckles to the space between his eyes. “He’s not to set foot in the house.”

“And I gather you won’t be there to give this order. When exactly will you be back? How do you expect me to explain this, Tommy? Ruby and Charlie play with his kids. He’s in and out of the place, all the maids know him, after Charlie was taken you put him in charge of securing--”

“Lizzie--” His hand dropped and his attention shifted to his teacup, as if its contents might hold the key to convincing her to follow his command without all the questions.

“So who is this Johnny bloke, anyhow?” Alfie asked, breaking into the bickering, a brief and quickly smothered cough punctuating his question. Had his guesses by now, ‘course he did, but even if he were right about the man being Tommy’s black cat, his Judas, that didn’t tell him much, did it?

When Tommy ignored the question, Lizzie filled in, uncertain. “He’s a family friend. I don’t understand, Tom, it doesn’t make sense. Do you think he had something to do with what happened the night Mosely--”

Tommy lurched to his feet, forgotten cup and saucer tumbling to the carpet, splashing his trousers with the dregs of his tea on their way down.

“Tommy--”

Before she could do more than reach for him, hand closing on air, Tommy was walking away. Didn’t head for the door to the outside world like Alfie expected, like he had when he couldn’t put an end to his sister’s questions. Weren’t looking to escape to the wind and the water pounding the sand, didn’t wolf-pace the room or light up on the balcony neither. Just wordlessly disappeared down the hall the way Alfie himself had come not so long before, leaving Lizzie Shelby staring after the space where his back had been as if debating with herself whether she should violate her good manners and pursue him into the unfamiliar house.

“Well,” Alfie said to his houseguest’s esteemed wife, left to the mercy of his good will in the awkward aftermath of abandonment. “Here we are, then.”

“Never had the knack, reading leaves.” She’d picked up the fallen teacup, studying what’d stuck to the insides as she sank back onto the couch. Held the porcelain cradled in her hands like it could speak to her if she let it. “He’s not coming back, is he.”

Whether she meant to the sitting room that morning or to the not-so-ancestral abode in Warwickshire -- and the marital bed -- Alfie couldn’t say. Either way the answer was doubtful. But here was an opportunity, an opening, right, whether Tommy would resent it or not, and chances were high he would. But then, he weren’t here to object.

“I don’t...” she trailed off, smoothing the fabric of her skirt over her knees. “Polly came back spitting mad, but she said he was fine. And when we were talking earlier he seemed it, seemed himself. What the fuck just _happened_.”

“Sure, yeah, he was fine, right until you mentioned your good family friend Johnny being near your children,” Alfie pointed out. And when she’d pressed him on it, he’d fled, probably to his room, to pace and smoke and get his gasping under control in private this time, where nobody could ask him any more questions.

She nodded, still gobsmacked.

“He got any reason you know of to doubt the man?”

“He trusts Johnny more than most. He’s known him since they were kids.” Alfie took that in. Betrayal of that sort, yeah, it would cut deep, wouldn’t it. “Hmm.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. It took awhile for things to get really bad, but he’d been all over the place for _months_. Acting paranoid, accusing his cousin of wanting to replace him. Turns out he was right about that.” She smiled, then, an awful self-deprecating thing. “Fuck, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You, of all people. You’re--”

“Yeah, what am I?” he asked, genuinely curious to hear her evaluation, this woman who’d known what Tommy Shelby was and married him anyhow.

She took in the room again, the heaps of books and scattered knick-knacks and the piano and radio and phonograph. The balcony doors and the stretch of paradise outside them.

“Retired, from the looks of it,” she said. “Out of the life.”

She struck him as a woman with nobody much to talk to, Lizzie Shelby. Words had built up in her with nowhere to go and his questions and Tommy’s departure had given her permission to set them free, release the tension to the ears of a disinterested party. Or somebody who weren’t a Shelby, anyhow. She was hesitating on the verge of more when a splintering crash carried from somewhere in the bowels of the house.

“Fuck me,” Alfie sighed. “What the hell is he tossing at the walls this time? I recommend you keep your china in a bloody vault, mate, because this particular habit of your husband’s has already cost me a lamp and a mirror, not to mention a perfectly good pitcher, right--”

Marie poked her head into the sitting room, took in Tommy’s absence with a hard little frown, and vanished again. After a moment her voice drifted muffled and indistinct from down the hall and she didn’t return.

Tommy’s wife shifted, picking at a frayed spot on the upholstery. “He’s-- I should--”

“Most likely blowing off steam,” Alfie assured her. “When he runs out of words he tends to smash things, which I assume is a new practice on his part, never seen him do anything so theatrical before this, right, if you leave out the grenade that weren’t actually there.”

Lizzie Shelby regarded him with something close to commiseration. “He’s really been here this whole time? Since Bedlam? Ada said he had but I never quite believed her.”

“Hmm, yeah. Soon enough after, anyhow.” Alfie tallied up the time since, couldn’t decide if it had felt shorter than the true number or like a year had passed. “Been-- three weeks now.”

“Christ. We thought he was fucking dead.” She frowned. “Why _here_?”

“Asked myself the same thing, right, but hell if I know,” Alfie said. “Just showed up and hasn’t left, ‘cept for the occasional jaunt to take in the sea air. Maybe he needed a holiday, hmm.” Which was frankly true and they both knew it, while also being absurd as an explanation for the current situation.

“Last I saw him he wasn’t speaking. Couldn’t tell if he was just angry at me still, at all of us, or--” A long-smothered, threadbare worry shown through. Somewhere under the thick shell of protective bitterness she loved him still. “The doctors said he’d stopped communicating at all about a week in, but none of them could say why.”

“Yeah, well, whatever his reasons, he weren’t talking when he got here, neither. Don’t think he _could_, at first.” He scratched at his beard, considering her. How much would she be willing to tell him? “You said his doctor made the call, to get him certified. Committed.”

She hesitated, then nodded, then the floodgates opened. “I didn’t even know he had a bloody psychiatrist. Things had gone on for so long… but it got worse after that fucking rally. I-- I sent the kids to stay with my sister. And he kept-- I don’t speak Rokker and Ada only remembers a bit. Arthur was no help, and Polly-- Polly refused to come. Johnny was the only one who understood him.”

So this Johnny was one of Tommy’s own people, then, not just one of the gang. Should have picked that up when she’d said he was camped down by the river, right.

“Johnny said he was talking to his mother. She’d done the same thing before she drowned, his mother. Stopped eating, talked to spirits. Nobody got her help. They say it runs in families, this kind of madness. But the gift does too and nobody could tell which it was. At least in Bedlam they could keep him from walking into any canals.”

“From what his sister told me it couldn’t have been an easy task, getting him there.”

She shook her head. Lingering shadows under her eyes suggested a long string of nights where sleep had been a desperate dream, even months later. “He knew they were coming. Told Johnny his mother’d warned him, warned him like she had in the tunnels, but he had no way of knowing we’d made the call. Took off on one of the horses bareback, not even a bridle on it. He’d got as far as the end of the drive when the van came. When he tried to jump the wall the horse spooked and threw him, stunned him, the only reason they managed to get their hands on him at all. Lucky he didn’t break his fucking neck. He hadn’t eaten a thing or slept in a week or he’d have been gone.”

Hmm. The big black horse, was it? Or maybe he had a whole stable of beasts to choose from. “What happened after the rally, you know, before your gardeners found him?”

She’d gone distant, Lizzie Shelby, the way Tommy did when he was wary about coming too close to something he saw in his mind’s eye. “Walked off on Arthur after they got back to the house. We heard a shot, Arthur and me, but there wasn’t a mark on him. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know whether _he_ knows what happened. Afterwards he was so... if he does know, he’ll never fucking say.”

It was the central bit of intelligence he’d tried to get out of them all since the beginning, wasn’t it. How the break had come, why things had shattered. So it felt like a warning, that last conclusion of hers. “Hmm. Right. Maybe… maybe it ain’t our fucking business to know.” Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t keep pestering him, would it, that question.

“You’ve been ill,” she said, out of nowhere. Sure the journey from his bedroom to the sitting room had used up what reserves he’d managed to build up over the past few days' recovery, but he’d thought he’d hid it well enough for a stranger. Had Tommy said something to her or had some small hint of infirmity given him away? Before his pride could muster an objection, Tommy Shelby’s wife went on, back on the subject at hand.

“This was a mistake, coming here. I should go. Tell him-- tell him I’ll keep the children safe.” And if keeping them safe meant keeping them away from Tommy himself, she’d do that too, he suspected.

Must’ve had a driver waiting for her, or driven herself, because she didn’t ask to call a cab. Just gathered her own coat from the hall closet and departed without a look back.

Not long after Mrs. Shelby took her leave but before Alfie’d quite succumbed to boredom he heard his name called, right, Marie’s voice carrying clear as day through the walls. Nothing particularly alarming in her tone far as he could tell, but a definite summons nonetheless. Shouting across the entire house weren’t typical of how Marie chose to handle her communication so he mustered the curiosity to lever himself up out of his chair.

“Yeah, what? Where’re you at?” he hollered, ‘cause it was going to take him a bit to get fully upright and operational. He shoved down the cough that wanted to sneak through at the change in position and grumbled to himself about the treachery of bodies, but Marie didn’t respond, did she, so he propelled himself down the hall to investigate. The most recent excitement from this direction had been Tommy tossing something breakable at a hard surface, so the obvious place to start was his room.

The door to the guest room stood open, the room itself apparently unoccupied and undisturbed, noon-bright and cozy. Bedcovers neatly pulled up, pillows plumped, curtains tied back, the only evidence anybody was in fact staying there at all the books left on every free surface. A stack of ‘em on the dresser, a couple spines Alfie recognized as from his own collection; another haphazard pile on the bedside table, dog-eared and left spread open on top of one another. Fucking atrocious way to treat a bound volume, but pragmatic, he supposed, for comparing the passages he’d left off with when he got back to ‘em at some later moment.

He was about to give up and continue his search elsewhere when Marie’s low murmur drew him further into the room. Sounded like she was in the lavatory, from the particular hollow echo of speech in a small tiled space. Before he could get there he caught himself from trodding on something glinting on the floorboards and nearly stumbled. Weren’t like he was going to attempt bending down to pick the thing up, so he kicked at it a little with the toe of his shoe and the shape clarified itself into the face of an oblong cufflink, the separated backing left near the threshold to the lavatory. Gold bits dropped like a trail of breadcrumbs to lead him on down the forest path in one of them children’s stories, the kind where something lay in wait in the dark to gobble you up.

Another sound, definitely from inside, but not one he could place. He’d just opened his mouth to give warning in case, well… this was the lavatory after all, innit, even if the door’d been left wide open. But whatever he’d meant to say fizzled out before he could utter it, because this was no longer a lavatory at all, it was a fucking war zone.

Hit first with a stench of spirit-drenched juniper, a familiar tang of rusted iron underneath. Next by bright red spattered and pooled, smeared and dripped over the black and white tiled floor. Probably not as much as he’d thought in his initial shock or Marie’d’ve done more than just call his name, right, she’d’ve screamed for an ambulance, but it was a fair amount all the same. Like walking into the aftermath of an ambush when all the bodies were fresh and the chance of a sniper’s shot still ringing in your ears, the sight sent Alfie reaching for a weapon he didn’t have and searching for an intruder in the small room before he’d made sense of what had met his eyes.

Marie, her back to him, crouched over and intently occupied. Just beyond her, Tommy wedged into the corner between the sink and the tub, head tipped back against the wall, legs splayed out, splotches of blood soaked into the cloth of his pale blue shirt. When Alfie’s paralysis broke and sent him another step into the room, still robbed of speech, he saw that Tommy’s shirtsleeves had been rucked up and his left forearm was clamped in Marie’s grip, a bloodstained towel wrapped elbow to wrist under her hands.

The smashed remains of a gin bottle registered on the tile floor, puddles of liquor bleeding into the red. A good-sized piece of jagged glass, slick with blood, lay innocently discarded near Tommy’s thigh. It took too long for Alfie’s battered brain to assemble the separate pieces into a whole, to understand what had happened. Fuck. Fuck, this hadn’t been an accident, this looked--

Calm as one of them statues of the Buddha, Marie found words before he did. “Good, you’re here,” she said without turning. “If you’ll just fetch my kit for me, I need to put in a few stitches.”

Tommy hadn’t reacted to his arrival at all.

“Oh, and Mr. Solomons, get me a quart of water from the kettle as well, add two teaspoons of salt, and mix it up.”

Life had a way of giving a man opportunities to discover new sources of currency he’d never’ve dreamt existed. So in the way that developed your first days in the trenches or you didn’t get no further, did you, Alfie found the energy to do as she’d asked, as promptly as his impediments allowed, knowing the bill would come due later because it always fucking did.

By time he’d got back Tommy was white as a sheet, his eyes gone glassy, breathing shallow and too quick, his free hand bloody and quivering where it lay on the tile floor at his side. Marie dropped Tommy’s wrist to his lap and dug through the bag Alfie’d handed over, pulling out supplies and setting them at her knees. Swift and businesslike as a field medic she slit the leg of Tommy’s trousers open with a small set of shears. Swiped at a patch of skin underneath with a wad of gauze soaked in alcohol, filled a syringe, and plunged it into the meat of his thigh. No struggle came like it had the night of the fever; it was as if Tommy’d already checked out entirely, didn’t seem to even know she was there. While she was waiting for the shot to kick in -- not that it seemed to make much of a fucking difference far as Alfie could see -- she scrubbed her hands in the sink and then crouched down again at Tommy’s side.

After checking her supplies she took his wrist in her hands and wiped away the blood, still oozing out at a good rate but not spurting, right, so he hadn’t nicked an artery, had he. It weren’t as bad as Alfie’d thought, then, an uneven cut a couple inches long, a few shallower scratches alongside. Hadn’t gone for the obvious spot nearest his wrist, where the vessels lay close to the surface, so maybe this hadn’t been what it’d first appeared to be after all. Even so he winced when Marie poured a good measure of the salty water into the wound, flushing it out, but Tommy didn’t even flinch. Marie’s sure hands tugged her little curved needle in and out of his skin, pulling the flesh back together and tying off a neat series of knots, and in the end there was only about ten stitches in all, nothing much really, not compared to any given day in Flanders.

Bit more than halfway through Tommy seemed to come round, blinking like he was waking from a heavy slumber. Slurred something and tried to take his arm back from Marie’s grasp. Lucky he weren’t very coordinated, whether from gin or what she’d stuck him with or something else, whatever had driven him to do what he’d done.

“Not just yet,” she said, somehow finishing the job. A hurt sound escaped him on the final dig of the needle, as if at last he could feel it.

After Marie knotted her last knot and seemed satisfied with her work she bandaged the arm and then his right hand, fingers sliced up where he’d gripped the piece of glass he’d used on himself. She’d just moved away a bit, sweeping shards of glass from his easy reach when he stirred again.

“Get the fuck off me,” he grated, eyes at half-mast. Then, mumbling: “Ada says… Ada says Michael… he got Charles back. Has him at the house. I have to--”

But whatever he had to do was lost.

Maybe she hadn’t given him as heavy a dose as the night of the fever, because by way of some strange alchemy as the drug got a grip on him he seemed to become more aware of the outside world, his eyes clearing a little, his breathing easing back down to a normal pace.

“C’mon, up you go,” Marie told him, as if nothing’d happened at all and she’d just found him there on the floor, the silly boy. Tommy was clumsy and slow but she coaxed him upright, where he swayed a little, staring through Alfie with an eerie wide-eyed blankness like he hadn’t the first clue who the hell he was and what the fuck he was doing there, which was a far sight more unsettling than all the blood and broken glass had been.

Fuck all Alfie could do, right, but get out of the fucking way. So contrary to his nature as it might’ve been he found himself jammed into the corner of the bedroom by the window, struggling to stay as unobtrusive as possible but also somehow unable to just withdraw from the situation. Tommy went where Marie led, out the lavatory and past Alfie and over to the bed. She sat him down on the mattress like a sleepy kid and stripped him of his ruined outer shirt and his shoes, telling him what she was doing before she did it as if reading from a manual. Left his torn trousers be, though, despite the spots of blood and the dried tea stain. The shaking in his hands had spread up his arms to the rest of him, so she pulled out one of the knit jumpers she’d bought him and carefully pulled it over his head and over the bandages until the only sign anything had happened at all was the swath of white around his right hand.

“Will you be wanting to sleep awhile, Mr. Shelby?” she asked when she was done. He shook his head but she guided him further onto the bed anyhow and he went, lifting his legs up onto the mattress when she prompted him with a pat to his knee. “Why don’t you just sit back against the pillows, then, hmm?” And he stayed where she put him, disturbingly compliant, as if he had no opinion on where and how she positioned his body at all.

When she turned to Alfie’s corner it took him a startled second to realize she was addressing him this time. “Give me a moment, Mr. Solomons, and I’ll bring you a chair. You can keep Mr. Shelby company while I tidy up the lavatory.” Still matter of fact, like Tommy hadn’t just walked in there and cut himself open with a hunk of broken gin bottle because his wife had asked him about a childhood friend.

By time she’d dragged in the wood chair that had been in Alfie’s own room and set it by Tommy’s bed, he was doubtful he’d make it the few feet from his corner without the supporting beams of his bones crumbling, sending him to a heap on the floor. In the end the cane did its job and saved him from too much humiliation beyond the amount of time it took him to get there. Not that nobody noticed -- Marie’d slipped back into the lavatory with an armful of supplies and Tommy, well. Tommy just blinked at the wall and sunk into his pillows, hands still faintly jittering where they rested in his lap.

Felt like he should say something, didn’t it. Alfie turned over the first thing that came to mind and discarded it as foolish. Then the second, then the third, then gave up. Listened to the faint ticking of the clock on the bedside table and thought determinedly of nothing, only to be jolted out of the shelter of his mental void when Tommy spoke again.

“Don’touch me.” He’d gone stiff, Tommy, squinting across the room at nobody, hands clenching at the blanket under him. Then he nailed Alfie with that narrow-eyed glare, words coming hard and precisely cut as granite. “Don’t fucking ask me to do it for you this time, eh? You hear me? Don’t need you following me around every fucking place as well.”

Shame flushed through him before he could stamp it out, before he could scoff or turn it back on him or act like he didn’t know what Tommy’d meant. That crystal blue light scattering off the vast stretch of sand, waves calmed for once, beach grass faintly rustling in the distance. Cyril at his feet as an unsuspecting witness, waiting for a scritch behind the ears that wouldn’t come again.

Hadn’t done anything like ask, had he.

_I was meant to be on holiday_, Tommy’d told him, and he’d pretended not to understand the fucking point.

They were still locked in that moment on the beach -- no bullets between them this time, nobody firing first, maybe nobody able to fire at all anymore, not even with words -- when Marie reappeared and shattered it.

“Alright then, Mr. Solomons. You should have a bit of a rest before your dinner.” His doubts about taking his leave must’ve been plain, because she dried her hands on her apron and gave him a tired nod. “We’ll be fine now. Go on.”

And he was just weary enough himself to obey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's officially been a year since I started writing this! Amazing. I realized while writing this chapter that the fic had absorbed a lot of themes around quarantine and sheltering in place, probably inevitably. Anyway thank you to everyone who is reading and letting me know what you think, when writing such a long fic for such a long time it really helps.
> 
> ***
> 
> Warning for graphic description of the aftermath of self-harm/ambiguous suicide attempt as well as discussions of past suicide attempts and discussion of commitment to a mental institution against the character's will. Graphic description of medical treatment of a wound. Warnings for PTSD and dissociation. 
> 
> Please feel free to message me in comments if you'd like more detail, or for me to summarize anything you'll need to know for the rest of the story if you'd rather skip it.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see end notes for content warnings specific to this chapter.

It was somehow still Friday, the final day in one of the stranger Februarys he’d had in his already strange life. After near a week shut up in his sickbed, planting himself in a chair on the balcony with a cup of tea while the gramophone’s soft notes drifted out to sooth his ears felt fucking decadent, as if he’d swanned off to a bloody resort. Since last he’d been outdoors spring had shaken the chill from her shoulders, turned her head up to the sky and decided to stay. Paradise, yeah. A paradise of sun and sand and salty sea breeze, the little peeping calls of the sandpipers and even the raucous screaming of the gulls.

For centuries toffs with more money than sense had been coming to Margate’s little slice of paradise to take in its healing waters or have themselves a holiday or to retire, even. He’d once told Tommy retirement was his intention, and though it’d been a fucking lie it’d somehow become his reality, hadn’t it, forced by the bullet that’d refused to go far enough into his fucking skull to make the difference. Hadn’t failed at much, Tommy Shelby, but seemed fateful the one thing he’d botched over and over again was suicide, his own and Alfie’s both. If that’s what today’s commotion had been about. If that’s what had happened after Mosley’s rally. If.

That bright day on the beach -- he’d never felt clearer. Never been more certain. Or he’d started out that way, right, until Tommy’s bloody dithering. Fucking Tommy Shelby. In that lavatory Tommy’d been the farthest thing from clear, from certain -- hadn’t seemed himself at all, had he, seemed a man in a trance, hypnotised. Threw everything into question, threw everything into shards of glass and smears of blood, into the hellish chaos of No Man’s Land, where the sheer noise could drive you to raise your head at the wrong moment in hopes a bullet might bring you blessed silence. Could that rightfully be called suicide? He had his doubts.

When he’d retreated to his room the impossibility of napping had been a foregone conclusion, but once his head hit the pillows he’d been out, extinguished, for a solid three hours. Slept through the proper time for dinner and hadn’t missed it. Dragging himself back into the waking world had been a particular torture, but he’d done it and staggered out to find Marie still sat in Tommy’s bedroom drooping over the book in her lap while Tommy himself slumbered on, propped in the pillows where he’d been hours before, head tipped to the side and hands resting loosely on top the quilt tossed over his legs. Marie hadn’t looked up from whatever she was reading and so Alfie’d left them, left them and made a decision and made a call and made himself a pot of tea.

He’d just pried himself out of his chair to put on a new record when Marie emerged from the hall, as overtaxed as he’d ever seen her. She goggled at him while he lowered needle to groove, as if trying to recall what she’d meant to be doing there. When he pushed past her, she turned and followed him into the kitchen where he warmed them both up some soup and ladled it into bowls, setting bread and the butter dish on the table and taking a seat. After a moment she took the other chair and bent over her bowl without the protest he could see she wanted to make to being served.

“Got a girl coming in the morning,” Alfie said after she’d finished most of her soup. It was the first either of them had spoken since just after Tommy’d done what he’d done, and it took her a moment to absorb his words and frown, grasping for his meaning. After all, the purpose behind him paying her a salary fit for a Hollywood star had been to limit the population of strangers tromping around interrupting his quiet afterlife in the first place.

“That won’t be necessary,” she said with a brittle hint of pride, but her shoulders had loosened in relief, hadn’t they, so the necessity seemed clear enough.

“Yeah, down from London. Came recommended, right. Discreet. She’ll take over the cooking and the like for a few days. We’ll see how it goes, hmm.”

“Discreet, eh?” Punctuated with a raised brow before she turned back to her bread.

“Cousin of Ollie’s,” he agreed, as if the discretion was therefore self-evident, which it was, yeah, ‘cause Ollie’s family knew how to keep their fucking mouths shut, didn’t they, which was why despite his many shortcomings when it came to espionage the lad still had the job he did. “We’ll put her up in the attic room.” Far enough she was unlikely to hear Tommy visiting with his ghosts at night, should it come to that.

With her domestic duties on the verge of being dispatched altogether, Marie seemed content to take a break for once, sinking into a chair in the sitting room with their dirty bowls soaking in the kitchen.

“He’ll likely sleep a bit longer,” she said after Alfie’d switched the musical accompaniment from the gramophone to the radio so he wouldn’t have to keep popping up to change the record.

“From what you poked him with?”

“In part.” What the other part might be was obvious, innit.

“And when he wakes up?” The sliver of mirror in Tommy’s trouser pocket the night of the fever. The purloined paring knife, the pitcher handle jabbed at the cabbie, the shard of gin bottle on the lavatory floor, the bloody dogged _resourcefulness_ of it all. “Last time he bolted straight out the door, didn’t he. How’s he going to take to being stuck again?”

“I explained before he fell asleep.” Hadn’t looked up to taking much in, Tommy, but Alfie didn’t contradict her. Marie kneaded the back of her neck, eyes closing on a sigh. “If he wants to leave that’s his right. We’re not-- this isn’t Bedlam.”

“Hmm.” Alfie thought of the bruises on Tommy’s back and arms and thigh, thought of a thing his aunt had let slip -- _the great Thomas Shelby, swaddled like a child who can’t behave_ \-- and what it most likely had meant. “Weren’t in withdrawal this time, you know. So if we’re not Bedlam, right, then why the needle?”

Marie’d been born the same year as him, a fact he usually forgot entirely she was so sprightly in her manner; but all at once this afternoon it seemed to have caught up with her -- more gray in her hair than he remembered, new lines and hollows in her face. He was used to thinking of himself as an old man; after the war that’s how he’d felt, ancient before his time, not yet thirty and bones already creaking like a fucking pensioner’s. So he’d played up his stoop and his cane, throwing his weight around with men twice his age and beating them at their own game. But they was both teetering on the edge of old age for fucking real now, him and Marie, in ways that got harder and harder to hide. With his two additional years of hard life and his undyed brush of hair, Tommy was right there with them. Still had a way to go before any of them could be called elderly, but nobody would mistake them for young ever again. Especially not after a week like this had fucking been.

“I heard the bottle go, same as you,” Marie said. “Didn’t know what it was, of course, but you were with Mrs. Shelby and I thought I should make sure nothing was amiss.”

Afie’d dismissed the crash to Lizzie Shelby, yeah, as Tommy making noise, just a kid in a tantrum. _Blowing off steam_, he’d told her. “Not the first time he’s broken shit since he got here. What made you think anything might be amiss?”

Marie’s lips thinned. “I knew he had the gin. He’d been off the tablets for a few days by then so it wasn’t any danger, and it wasn’t… unexpected. I meant to speak to him about it but then you fell ill and I couldn’t spare the attention.”

Weren’t really an answer, was it. “That what you’d been tussling over, you and Tommy? While I was, you know,” he waved his fingers in the air.

“You remember that?” She frowned. “No. No, Mr. Shelby insisted we take you to the hospital. _Fuck his bloody wishes_, he said.”

Oh. When Marie’d first come to work for him and death -- the fucking laggard -- seemed merely put off for a few days at most, he’d required as part of her contract that she not lug him into a hospital to expire. That he hadn’t come to fucking Margate to waste away surrounded by the beady eyes of bloody vultures. That when it happened he wanted it to be where he was, at home. Her agreement to those terms without argument was half the reason he’d hired her.

“Had a hard time while you were in the worst of it, Mr. Shelby did.” Marie continued. “Helped where he could but there wasn’t much to do but wait it out. I was occupied, of course, but I knew he wasn’t sleeping much, and when he did there were nightmares. It wasn’t unexpected,” she said again, and he wanted to ask what she meant by it but she went on before he could muster an approach. “I suspect that’s when he started with the gin in earnest. Once you woke up he seemed on firmer ground, so I let it go.”

Tommy, hunched on the floor at the foot of his bed, bottle dangling between his knees as he spoke of rats gnawing the dead.

“Firmer ground, right.” Alfie scratched at his beard. “Even if you knew he had the bottle, s’not a direct leap, hmm, from that to… you know. The need for intervention of a medical sort.”

Marie met his gaze and he could see knowledge there, yeah, she knew something more than she was saying. Something else had happened while he’d been scrambled by fever in his bed. Something she didn’t seem in a rush to divulge.

“When I got to the guest room he was shut up in the lavatory with the door locked.” She’d taken on the cadence of a field nurse reporting to a superior, a dry and detached manner she never bothered to assume with Alfie’s own physicians. “Didn’t answer my knocking but I could hear him, hear him fighting for air. So I thought it best to force the lock.”

“Did you, now.” He raised a brow, impressed at the unforeseen skill omitted from her resume, but she ignored him.

“Found him in a state. I wasn’t sure at first whether it’d been an accident, then I saw the glass in his hand.”

“You stopped him.” Weren’t really a question, because Tommy was still alive and hadn’t needed an ambulance. Only real question was how she’d managed it.

“His hands were shaking too hard to do any real damage,” she dismissed. “He didn’t know I was there, hadn’t heard the door open, didn’t hear when I spoke to him. In a stupor, the way he was at the beginning.”

“Thought that was the drug,” Alfie said, more rattled at the retelling than he had been while witnessing the events themselves, when there hadn’t been space or time to fully consider the implications.

“No, it’d been long enough he was in withdrawal by then,” she reminded him. “They’d diagnosed him with dementia praecox in Bedlam, and it can present with catatonia. Like a state of shock, the mind retreats. The phenobarbital -- in the dosage they were giving him it puts patients to sleep; but it can also bring a patient out of stupor.”

Tommy, unresponsive and bloody on the tiled floor, unaware even as she’d stitched him up. The slow way he’d seemed to wake despite his eyes having been open the whole fucking time.

“So that’s why you used the needle on him? To break him out of it?”

“Doesn’t always work,” she said.

Some sort of demented children’s march reached his ears as he absorbed Marie’s tale. Fucking hell but the tastes of whoever chose the tunes tended toward the truly disturbed at times. Alfie shifted in his seat, thrown into discomfort as if the cushions had turned to unforgiving stone. Just that morning he’d sat in the chair where Marie perched now and probed Tommy’s wife for more gossip while Tommy’d been slicing himself up down the hall. Seemed as if a hundred years had passed since then.

“I thought…” He shifted again, fiddling with the ring on his thumb, thinking of Tommy handing over the switchblade to his safekeeping. “Before I, you know, before my recent setback, I’d thought things were on the up.”

Marie gave him a nod. “You’ve been treating him a bit like a hobby, Mr. Solomons, but he’s a man. And this hurt runs deeper than a few week’s holiday can mend.”

Right. “So you think he’d be better off back there, back in Bedlam?”

“Bedlam’s not the only place that treats this sort of thing. Not even the best of ‘em,” Marie said. “But if you’re asking whether I think he should be in a hospital now?”

Alfie nodded. He’d foregone morphine since waking up that morning and felt more stone sober than he’d ever been in his life.

She considered the notion, seriously, wearily, and when she spoke again every word was chosen with care. “Sometimes… sometimes at Queen Square when a soldier was thrown back into the battlefield and unable to break free of it they’d hurt themselves with whatever was on hand, trying to make it stop.”

“So you don’t think he intended to... you know. Board a train to the beyond.”

Dunno why he’d resorted to the oblique when for weeks he’d been chattering on to Tommy about offing himself as freely as he'd discuss the weather. But this morning had left him a coward, hadn’t it. Since the start he’d craved nothing more than to hear the story, right -- from Tommy’s family, from Tommy himself -- as if the events following Mosley’s rally had been a picture show and he’d ducked out at intermission. Truth was he hadn’t been prepared for the stark reality of it. Hadn't been prepared at all to see Tommy’s hand in ribbons from gripping the fucking shard he’d used on himself, Tommy with glassy button eyes as Marie arranged his limbs on the bed like a doll.

“I can’t be certain,” Marie said. “He didn’t go for the box of razors in the cabinet, which would have done more damage. Either way… normally, yes, I’d say he needed to be in a place where he could be looked after more closely than I can provide on me own.”

“Normally.”

She shrugged. “In this case it might not be best, not after his history with Bedlam. We’ll see how he is in the morning.”

_And if it happens again? _The question hung over them, unuttered, as the music finally moved on to something more fitting the moment.

Later, as he was getting himself ready for bed -- just after eight o’clock and so beat he was stumbling even with the support of his cane, yeah, sad fact that it was -- he heard them talking in Tommy’s room, but neither of ‘em emerged again and after a short while the voices fell silent. He’d seen Marie lugging in the camp bed she’d used when he’d had a particularly bad night early on, so whatever she thought of Tommy’s intentions it seemed she weren’t planning on leaving him unattended.

The look that had flitted over Lizzie Shelby’s face when Alfie’d talked her down from going after Tommy that morning came back to him. Hadn’t recognized it at the time, but it’d held something like relief, hadn’t it, relief that somebody had taken the decision off her shoulders. Weren’t an emotion he was used to, yeah, handing over the fucking reigns like this. But at some point it had become habit and he weren’t sure what to make of it. Rabbit or realist, he weren’t sure what it made _him_.

_What do you care how it’s done_, Tommy’d railed at him when Alfie had attacked his foolish fucking plan to kill Mosley himself, _when you haven’t lifted a hand to do more than shoot at the fucking gulls?_

The only real decision Alfie’d made since Tommy’d bungled his carefully crafted plan to end his inevitable infirmity was to hire Marie. Couldn’t even say keeping Tommy around the past few weeks had been any kind of definite choice, more a series of refusals to choose otherwise. An antidote to boredom rather than any kind of plan.

_Easy to be a god, isn’t it, god of sitting in your fucking beach house, listening to your piano jingles and watching the ships go by._

He’d countered Tommy’s judgment of him with an excuse about the cancer, just as he was using pneumonia as an excuse now. Oh, not that he’d have been any fucking use keeping watch tonight -- that was the rub, weren’t it, the infirmity was real. But if he was a god, yeah, he weren’t a god he recognized any longer. And if his fate was to become a ghost, he’d rather spend his phantomhood tormenting Mosley than clinging to Tommy Shelby's coattails for however long he lasted. Only question was how the fuck to pull it off. Especially as the only other man determined to take Mosley down, the man with the best chance of getting close enough to succeed, was currently under a makeshift suicide watch in Alfie’s fucking guest bedroom.

What use were either of them, state they were in, against the beast Mosley’d unleashed?

In the morning light it seemed an absurd fucking question. The cough returned with doubled fury and Alfie succumbed to the inevitability of the morphine before he attracted any attention. Marie met Ollie’s cousin at the train station and apparently briefed her on what would be expected of her on the trip back, because the girl -- not a girl at all, was she, a war widow with a kid already old enough to be on his own -- got right to work without any fuss and more importantly without any bothersome questions about the two men shut up in their respective rooms until midmorning.

Eventually Alfie hauled himself out to the sitting room and accepted tea from the lass -- kept forgetting her name, but it was Beryl, Marie reminded him as she took a moment to knead his reluctant flesh. Tommy emerged even later. Alfie hadn’t asked how the night had gone and Marie hadn’t offered, but he’d a wager going with himself on the probability Tommy appeared at all and whether his reappearance would also mark his exit for good. If it’d been a real bet he’d have lost a healthy sum because Tommy showed his face around eleven, raw and shattered and gray. Hadn’t lost much blood in the scheme of things but looked it, moving gingerly as a man riddled with shrapnel, avoiding everybody’s eyes. Not hiding shit, though; instead his shirt sleeves were rolled back as if challenging Alfie to ask about the bandages. The bruises from Bedlam, he noted, weren’t yet gone -- faint faded yellow and brown at Tommy’s wrists, testament to how deep they’d been to’ve lasted this long.

In the interest of giving Marie a break -- which had been the whole purpose of bringing in Ollie’s cousin, hadn’t it -- after dinner Alfie pulled out a chess set and assembled it on a foot rest shoved between his couch and Tommy’s armchair. Tommy’d frowned at the silent summons but he’d gone along with it easy enough after Alfie made his first move, the opening stage of the Queen’s Gambit. Tommy’s random and nonsensical defense was the first clue he might not actually know what the fuck he was doing. For a man of strategy, right, to be this hopeless at chess, well, it threw everything into doubt, didn’t it.

Or maybe it meant nothing more than he was new to the game.

“You’d mentioned Ollie,” Tommy said halfway through their second match, the first words he’d spoken to Alfie since the previous morning. Hadn’t reacted at all to the strange woman suddenly in their midst, Tommy, leading Alfie to assume Marie had filled him in. But now he weren’t sure at all, and Tommy must’ve seen the lost look on his face because his frown deepened. He cleared his throat and went on. “Ollie’d told you people’d been talking, in Camden Town. Making plans.”

Right. Alfie took one of Tommy’s pawns and tapped it against the board before setting it aside. “I did, yeah.” Hadn’t thought he’d been listening at the time.

“He give you a sense of how many there were? These people talking and making plans?”

Beryl, who’d been clearing away their tea cups and tidying up the untidyable, paused at his question, narrow-eyed. “What d’you know about it?”

Tommy blinked and swiveled to study her, apparently unbothered by the sudden intrusion of the help into the conversation. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s why I ask.”

“Hmm.” She turned a quick glare on Alfie. “Well, none of your concern is what it is.”

“Thank you, Beryl, for your contribution,” Alfie dismissed.

Beryl didn’t budge. “I don’t care who you are, Mr. Solomons, you’ve no right to be spilling our business to this--”

“So there is business.” Tommy made another blundering move, leaving his queen exposed.

Alfie weighed ending the fucking game right there, but let it be for the moment, shifting a pawn instead, buying time.

“I know who he is,” Beryl said. “And I know who he works for.”

“Do you?” Alfie’s annoyance was curdling. Turning out to be one of his more abysmal ideas, weren’t it, bringing a stranger into their midst. “And just who d’you think this man is?”

“One of them blackshirts. Saw his picture in the paper, him at that rally they had, the one up in Birmingham last year.”

Whatever color Tommy’d managed to regain was fast leaking away, but he seemed to be considering Beryl in a calm enough fashion, the gears in his brain whirring to life. Before the interruption Alfie’d meant to distract him from the topic, push it off for another time for reasons that should have been fucking clear to Tommy himself after the day before. But Tommy’s head was tilted to the side now and all his considerable attention was on Ollie’s foolish relation.

“And what will you do with the information that a blackshirt is staying with your cousin’s employer?”

Beryl pulled up short. His tone hadn’t been in any way threatening -- only blandly curious -- but she knew who Alfie was and she must have had an inkling who Tommy himself might be beyond Mosley’s toady from the paper. Ollie would surely have warned her.

“You one of ‘em? One of them that’s talking and making plans?” Alfie broke in. Her chin lifted and she kept a stony silence. He sighed. “You think I, being who I am, that I’d harbour a fucking blackshirt as a guest in my home? Expect one of my own people to serve him and clean up after him, no matter what salary I was paying?”

“Shouldn’t have let on you were listening to us,” Tommy added quietly, even fucking earnestly, like he was offering her advice. “Shouldn’t have let on you knew who I was. If you want to be of service to them, you need to fucking think about these things.” She’d coloured, a flush running up her throat, still angry, still suspicious, but considering what he’d said and why he might’ve said it. “I won’t tell you what to do,” Tommy continued. “I won’t tell you not to let your people know I’m here, or what we talk about. But you should take into account the impact destroying trust in Mr. Solomons will have on your cause. And whether working with us might benefit it more.”

Hadn’t quite believed it, had he, when the papers told him Tommy Shelby’d gone into politics. Had himself a fucking laugh, wondering what angle he was playing. But while he was bloody awful at chess, maybe Tommy’s eye for strategy was as keen as ever.

“I’ll think on it,” Beryl said, as if between them the two men she faced hadn’t been responsible for the bloody demise of more people than she’d ever known. And with that she turned a stiff back and left the room.

“Fuck me,” Alfie said, and then took Tommy’s queen after all.

Accepting the defeat without comment, Tommy began setting the pieces back in their proper places on the board, readying himself for another match he couldn’t hope to win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content note for discussions of self harm/ambiguous suicide attempt, medicating a person without their consent, and hospitalization for mental illness.
> 
> I *think* there will be one more chapter, but it may be two by time it's written. Thanks again to everyone still reading and everyone who has left comments, I really appreciate your support.


	22. Chapter 22

“Just saying.” Alfie paused, head tilted to study the neat black and white squares laid out before him, mind veering away from just how closely they resembled the tiles in the guest room lavatory, a comparison which had never once occurred to him and now wouldn’t leave him be. “Hrm, right. I’m just _saying--”_

“Whatever it is you’re just saying, your time’s up, eh.” Tommy leaned forward to tap at the edge of the board. “Stop the bloody bluffing and make your move.”

Sunset had waltzed into the sitting room with a peachy glow, sending a breeze to ruffle the lace curtains on either side of the open balcony doors, sweet with sprouting beach grass and salt and little chirpy birdcalls. Since Beryl had taken over the tidying up not one speck of dust dared rest on any of the assembled clutter, but something about the arrival of spring highlighted every frayed thread on Tommy’s armchair and every worn spot on the carpet in a way that hadn’t ever caught Alfie’s attention until now. Strange, innit, how the feel of a place could transform entirely without any one piece of it shifting an inch.

“Bluffing? Bluffing? As if I would need to put off the fucking inevitable?” He had Tommy where he wanted him, a handful of moves away from finishing the game. They’d further to go in his education if he hadn’t yet caught on to this fact, but if he had he’d given no sign. “If my musing was a tactic of delay, mate, it’d only be to spare you the humiliation of another pitiful loss, right. I am _trying_ to convey to you important information here, Tommy. Very important and vital intelligence, yeah, especially for an incurable heathen such as yourself.”

A week after falling prey to his latest bout of pneumonia, Alfie’d found himself again at the mercy of a body which refused to do his fucking bidding, leaving him washed up and stranded in his bed once more like a beached whale. Up and about too soon, Marie’d chided him after he’d been prickly to her about it, though the source of any recent strain that may have contributed went unmentioned. No fever, at least, and with a steady diet of morphine the cough weren’t so bad, but his bones had turned to lead and his muscles to jelly, leaving him to spend much of the three days following Beryl’s arrival sleeping it off. He’d hired the extra hand to give Marie a break, hadn’t he, but shit didn’t always go according to plan.

Tommy’d taken up his spot in the bedside chair, ignoring Alfie’s peevish attempts to drive him off with a vague serenity he’d suspected might have been at least partially chemical. A guess Marie more or less confirmed the next morning when she let slip that she’d replenished her supply of phenobarbital tablets in Alfie’s name, in case the doctor made any inquiries. They didn’t discuss why Tommy might’ve been so amenable to voluntary sedation, but after those first two days some of his usual sharpness had started to return, though he had the tendency to drift out of focus whenever he weren’t directly engaged in conversation. One of his piles of books materialized under the chair he spent most of the day occupying whether Alfie was awake or not, but he never seemed to make much progress in whatever tome currently took up his lap, and Alfie hadn’t witnessed him so much as turn a page. Chess had rather obviously been beyond them both.

And so his well-intentioned scheme to relieve Marie of her burdens had been thrown into the shitter, as Beryl, competent as she was at running a household, couldn’t take the place of a trained nurse. But Marie must’ve judged his condition improved that morning because when he’d finally made it out of his fucking bed he’d found the house empty and mostly silent. Weren’t a familiar sort of silence, what with the rhythms of the extra body not yet faded into the backdrop for him the way Tommy and Marie’s small sounds of living had long since done. Beryl brought him his tea and announced Marie had taken the morning off and that his blackshirt friend -- meaning Tommy, he supposed -- had gone out just after sunrise to some nefarious end she daren’t suspect, which Alfie’d translated as a beachside stroll. Sure enough, just as Alfie’d finished his breakfast Tommy returned, bringing the bluster of spring with him in the pink painting his cheekbones and nipping the tips of his ears.

Alfie’d had the chess set out on the stool and properly assembled before Tommy’d hung up his things. They’d proceeded in hopelessly lopsided battle well into the afternoon, breaking only briefly for a meal, and, after Marie’s return, a brief and humiliating reminder to take his medicine.

“Intelligence, is it.” Tommy sat back in his chair, fiddling with the edges of the bandage wrapped around his hand. Used the fucking thing as if it didn’t pain him one bit, and maybe it didn’t, right, but it was distracting as hell to watch. “Apply your intelligence to the game, Alfie, before we both fucking expire from waiting.”

It was a strange moment, weren’t it, left suspended in the wake of those thoughtless words, neither of them sparing a glance at the length of gauze wrapped around Tommy’s exposed forearm and the ten stitches beneath. If it weren’t for the bandages and a lingering skittishness, tightly reined in, Alfie would've believed Tommy’d packed away what had happened in that lavatory so well he’d left himself no memory of it at all.

“Hmm. Yeah. Appropriate,” Alfie said finally, bending his attention on the board again. “Appropriate, innit, what I was meaning to say before your rude fucking interruption. A warning, yeah, an ancient warning having to do with assassinations and the recent turning of the month.” He slid his bishop to where he wanted it to go and looked up at his opponent with a frown through his brows. Tommy didn’t interrupt, didn’t scan the board despite the fact the clock now ticked down his turn. Just waited him out, waited for him to finish his soliloquy. So he did him the courtesy of giving him what he wanted. “Beware, mate, beware the Ides of March.”

“That’s it, that’s your warning, is it?” Something tugged at the corner of Tommy’s mouth. A fishhook, perhaps, on an invisible line.

“It is, yeah.”

“We’ve ten days yet before we have to concern ourselves with any fucking Ides.”

“Suppose like Caesar you’re the type to ignore the wisdom of a soothsayer, Thomas, but I, I for one, prefer to avoid any and all prophesied assassinations, whether on the receiving end or--”

But just like that, the mood had turned. “My diary is free of bloody assassinations,” Tommy muttered, escaping the tug of the fishhook as he executed the fatal move Alfie’d been waiting on. It’d take another five or so turns to complete, but whether he realized it or not he’d sealed the fate of their current match.

“Is it?” Alfie said, all traces of humor drained away. Chances were Tommy Shelby’s official diary, wherever it was kept, hadn’t had anything in it at all since early December.

“Yeah.” The angle of his jaw was defiant, but he failed to meet Alfie’s eyes, so what he meant by it weren’t entirely clear.

“New development, that.”

“Hmm.” Not gonna explain a thing about this change of heart when it came to throat-slitting, was he. Alfie eyed the chess board, the scattered pieces remaining, and recalled that silence had sometimes prodded Tommy into a response even back when he’d only the two words to work with. Took another couple moves, the noose tightening, the final blow approaching, before Tommy finally spoke. “Killing the man won’t kill his message, it’ll just leave his movement with a martyr.”

“And the alternative?” Alfie studied him as intently as he had the chess board. “Leave him to spread his shit over the field while your Tory friend dithers behind the lines?”

If he was aware of the bleak edge to his words, it didn’t show. “Look for a weakness from within his organization.”

Which put him right where he’d been months before, on a return trip to Bedlam. “Stay on as MP, you mean. Stay his right hand.”

He’d got that look about him again, the detached, slightly unfocused one that somehow made his eyes seem even bluer. “Don’t see there’s much of a choice.”

“Hmm. Can you get back up on that stage, you know,” Without a glance at the board Alfie swept up another ill-fated soldier in one hand and positioned his own man where he wanted it with the other. “Get up there and stand next to him while he whips ‘em up with his words night after night, your men beating anyone who speaks against him?”

“What is it you really want to know, Alfie?”

“If I’m gonna stick my neck out,” he said, setting his captured knight aside with the rest of the POWs. “If I’m gonna risk any of my people--”

“I don't recall asking anything of you, let alone your fucking neck,” Tommy snapped. “And it sounds to me as if your people have things well in hand on their own.”

“--I need some guarantee you’ll be around to hold up your end of the deal.”

Tommy leveled him with a gaze shocking in its frankness, the game unfinished and forgotten between them. “There are no fucking guarantees. For either of us.”

So here they were, then: the harsh reality of it. A scheme headed on one hand by a bloke liable to off himself -- even if accidentally -- and the other on the verge of crumbling into decay. Between them they might make up a single sane, reliable conspirator.

“Then it can’t depend on either of us, can it, this plan.”

Sat with that awhile, Tommy did. Didn’t ask _who’s this us you’re talking about, _didn't ask _what fucking plan_. “No,” he said slowly, “I don’t suppose it can.”

“Told your wife to let your nephew take the throne. You serious about that? Just gonna hand over everything you’ve built?”

Tommy glanced away out the balcony doors, towards careless evening sky and the remnants of puffy clouds, their undersides turning lavender and pink as the sun hid herself away for the night. “More important things on me plate.” But there was a deep line between his brows, a pensive twist to his mouth.

“You certain the payoff will be worth sacrificing your crown?”

“Won’t be anything left if I don’t,” he said, with a sweeping gesture that took in Alfie and the house named Lethe and the whole fucking country, probably. “Everything else is a distraction.”

“Won’t be nothing left if you don’t fucking make it far enough to see it through, see him finished.”

Had a particular talent for stillness when he wanted, Tommy. Made you take him seriously even if what he was saying was patently absurd. “No fight is without risk.”

“Yeah, well, the risk ain’t just to yourself this time, innit.”

Which earned him a huff of air that might have been a laugh in another man. “Never fucking was.”

His first wife. His boy, snatched by that abomination of a priest. All the rest of them ghosts that’d trailed him here to Margate.

Right. “That why you were gonna slit his throat, why you went for the bang at the rally? Worried you couldn’t see a more lengthy operation through to the finish?” Check and mate. Tommy stared back at him and didn’t say a word to dispute it. “What’ll it take, hmm, to see it through this time?”

“If I knew that,” Tommy said finally, “I wouldn’t fucking be here, would I.”

Which could, of course, have meant any number of things.

Should’ve occurred to him far earlier, yeah, that over the past few weeks he and Tommy had fallen into a cozy fucking routine, settling in after supper to take in the tunes on the radio, and now that it appeared unlikely to set him into a panic, the evening news. Tommy’d even gone so far as to drag the fucking thing into Alfie’s room while he’d been bed-bound. And sure enough, after sucking down his post-meal cigarette out on the balcony Tommy had taken a moment to retrieve the radio, setting it back in its rightful place, in what Alfie supposed was a quiet vote of confidence in his continued recovery. They played another round of chess waiting for the nightly broadcast and if Tommy came close to pinning him down this time, Alfie didn’t give him the pleasure of letting on. The game ended in a draw just as the posh voice of the newsreader interrupted the flow of the music.

“The banking world was thrown into tumult today when London stockbroker Buckmaster & Moore advised clients to sell their shares in British industry and invest in the United States and Canada instead.” Whether he was reporting on the newest tittle-tattle out of Hollywood or the further collapse of the British economy, the bloke on the radio always sounded exactly the same level of bland lack of concern about it all. “Suggesting England’s decline to be a permanent one, Buckmaster & Moore announced ‘the economic, the political and climatic advantages of the United States and Canada in the next few decades will be so overwhelmingly great that these countries offer the most attractive field for investment.’”

“Wonder what your good pal Oswald made of that development,” Alfie commented.

Tommy raised one arched brow and said nothing as the voice moved on.

“And in international news, Communists staged a day of protest against hunger and unemployment, leading police and demonstrators to clash in cities the world over.”

The rest of the broadcast was the usual shit, of interest only to the fucking toffs. Alfie waited until the voice faded back into a choral number to turn to Tommy again. The news about the Communists had jarred loose a stray thought.

“Unless my memory fails me, my men weren’t the only ones causing trouble the night of that rally.”

Tommy plucked a cigarette out of his silver case and twiddled with it, unsmoked. It’d taken him a bit to catch onto, yeah, but Alfie’d realized over the past couple days of captivity that since he’d first fallen ill Tommy had abandoned smoking indoors altogether. Polite of him, sure, and probably for the best given the aggravated state of Alfie’s lungs, but without a smoke or a drink he seemed at a loss for what to do with his hands. He’d taken up a bunch of fidgety tics in the place of compulsively adding to a pile of ash, but tended to fall back on playing with one of the damned things before eventually sticking it back in its case for later.

“Your sister was one of ‘em, right, one of them Communists. So you said, anyhow.”

“Once upon a time.” A wary watchfulness peered out at him underneath the noncommittal politician.

“Right, right, once upon a time. She keep up with any of ‘em, now she’s joined the bourgeoisie?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Which ten to one was a fucking lie, but Alfie let it pass. “Besides,” Tommy continued, “She’s not the only Bolshevik in Birmingham.”

“Well, no, suppose she’s not.”

“There’s a--” he broke off and shook his head. “I’ve another contact in the Party, but chances are she won’t believe a fucking word I say.”

“Because she suspects beneath your Labour coat your shirt might be a blackish color?”

Tommy nodded. “Close enough, anyway. She was-- I let her think I was something I wasn’t, once. I doubt she’ll trust me a second time.”

More to it than that, clearly, but he failed to fill in the blanks. Probably fucked her on his way to something he really wanted, like he had with the Duchess. Didn’t matter whether it was literally or figuratively speaking, the truth was most likely a bit of both.

“Jews in Camden Town, Bolsheviks in Birmingham. Got connections, right, across the country, both them groups. Not to mention the overlap between ‘em, Jewish Communists and Communist Jews. Already opposing Mosley on their own, you know, with a bit of nudging, mate, in the right fucking direction--”

Something had flooded Tommy’s face. Weren’t so obvious as hope, or even relief. But he’d still been thinking of himself as the sole fucking barricade between Oswald Mosley and the world, somehow, hadn’t he, the silly boy. And here were two factions already in the streets fighting the man and his message on their own terms.

“Without coordination, without strategy, they’ll just be crushed by the coppers.” The response came too quickly for it to be anything but an idea he’d considered from every angle months back, before the whole playing-card tower of his plans had toppled. Of course he had, Alfie was just playing catch-up, weren’t he. Felt like he'd been doing nothing but playing catch-up since Tommy materialized in that chair. Tommy rubbed at the space between his eyes, then leaned forward, hell-bent on making his point. “And if the coppers don’t do it, they’ll bring in the Army, the way they put down the general strike. And the _respectable_ people will see them as instigators, as troublemakers. He’ll use that against them.”

“It’s a start, though, innit.”

“It’s--” Tommy was watching him, gaze hooded. “Maybe.”

Which was the most Alfie was gonna get out of him that night. He let the music fill the space left by the conversation’s end, let the sense of possibility lay fallow. Tommy weren’t wrong about how the two groups who’d done the most to openly stand up to Mosley were viewed: outside agitators, both of ‘em. It wouldn’t be enough, especially if they were working apart from each other with no goal but shouting slogans and waving signs. But it had got the creaky gears of his own mind going, and Tommy’s, well, Tommy’s never stopped even when he was out of his head, did they. They’d each carried off jobs with steeper odds than this; but maybe never with this much hanging in the balance.

He’d bought his freedom for the evening from Marie by vowing he’d be in his bed by nine, and it was already twenty minutes past. With some mumbled excuse he started to dislodge himself from the comfortable embrace of the couch and found that his legs had other ideas altogether when it came to holding him upright. His knees were starting to go, one of his hands shooting out for the cane he’d left just out of reach, when he found himself caught under the arm in a firm grip. It was so deftly done and without any stain of pity that he couldn’t bring himself to give in to the impulse to shove Tommy away even if he could’ve done it without toppling over like a puppet that’d lost its strings. Tommy didn’t say nothing about it, not even to cover for him, none of that _whoops there we go now_ shit that even Marie occasionally let slip sometimes. Just adjusted his hold when Alfie tested things out by taking a step, and then followed his lead all the way down the hall to his bedroom.

It weren’t usually a long trip but he was tired and in the end caneless as he was he couldn’t help but lean more than he would have wanted to, lean into the solid support at his side. Lean into the warmth of Tommy’s arm around his back, the ribcage expanding and contracting against his own, the faint whiff of soap instead of piney gin or a cabbie’s cheap rum. Could’ve left him at the threshold, Tommy, but instead he waited until Alfie was sat on his bed, then let him go and took a step back. And if Alfie’d expected his expression to be closed or distant or smugly fucking charitable, it was none of those things. In the soft gold glow of the little lamp Marie must’ve left on for him it was nothing he knew how to read at all.

When he spoke it was hushed, as if children were sleeping nearby. “Goodnight, Alfie.”

And before Alfie could find an answer, he’d vanished into the dark of the hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone reading and commenting! I keep underestimating how long it will take to wrap things up so there are still a couple of chapters to go.


	23. Chapter 23

“What will you do when he’s gone?”

A question lobbed at him with all the casualness of a hand grenade in the midst of a tea party, which Alfie supposed this was, right, given Marie had just poured them both cups and set out a plate of biscuits. He doctored his up with a dollop of cream and a bit of sugar and swirled it around until it went a lovely tawny shade. Took a biscuit and broke it in half, dunked a corner in his tea and popped it in his mouth. He almost asked who she fucking meant, before settling on a less combative response. But not by much.

“Who says he’s going somewhere?”

Marie didn’t bother giving that foolishness any of her time. They both knew full well Tommy was off meeting Winston Churchill’s man at some pub in Margate. Hadn’t discussed any of the recent developments, him and Marie. Hadn’t heard a peep from her on what she’d witnessed, him and Tommy with heads bent together over their plotting, the calls out, the way the maid from Camden Town had taken a less than professional interest in their doings.

“Will you go back to London?”

Full of these tidbits this morning, weren’t she, Marie. “Miss the smog, do you?” he tossed off.

“For what you’re paying me, you could hire a proper staff.” Marie sipped her own tea, eyes on him the whole time. “Keep Beryl on, get a cook in.”

“Oh, I see, yeah, don’t I. You’ve had a better offer.” It had been a teasing jab, right, but something shifted in her face like astonishment at a target accurately hit. “You have, have you?” And given she hadn’t left the house in over a week there was really only one place such an offer could have come. “Got used to having a personal nurse on hand, settled on taking one with him when he goes, hm?”

Marie laughed then, as if delighted at the absurdity of the thought. “Mr. Shelby spoke to me of an opportunity, yes. But not for himself.”

Alfie was lost now, lost in the weeds and knew it. Weren’t a place he enjoyed being. “What then, he’d like you to look after his fucking horses for him?”

She shook her head, still amused. “He’s set on opening a home for soldiers back in Birmingham. Men with shell shock.” Men like himself, she didn’t say. “Wanted my advice.”

Despite it all sometimes he still forgot Tommy was an actual Member of fucking Parliament, with the political gestures of goodwill for the common man such a position required. Even before he took office he’d had a dangerous tendency towards establishing charitable institutions; they’d sprung up like weeds in Birmingham the last five years, mostly schools for destitute children. Alfie had his own pet projects to salve his conscience, didn’t he, but he favored tracking down blokes who was already doing the work and slipping them the cash to keep doing it, not establishing the whole fucking mess from scratch.

“Wants you to run it, you mean.” He set his cup in the saucer and regarded Marie.

“No. I told him I’d had enough bureaucracy after Queen Square, even with meself on top this time,” Marie said. “But I could help him get started. Put him in touch with the right people. The sort who won’t--”

“Tie ‘em down and pump ‘em full of drugs?”

Her merriment dropped away. “Yes.”

“Hmm.” Alfie shifted in his chair, stiffness in his back making itself known already. “Right. Well I hope you charge him a decent commission for your advice.”

“We talked some, the last couple weeks. He asked why I was doing this, helping him. Not quite how he put it, but it was what he wanted to know.”

“Yeah? And what’d you tell him?”

“Told him it was a job you were paying me to do.” It was clearly a lie, or at least not the total truth, but he let it go. “He didn’t ask me why you’d pay me to do such a thing.”

Tenacious as a fucking bulldog, Marie. “Didn’t he?”

“No. He didn’t.” Sometimes Marie reminded him jarringly of his mum. The way she’d level that stare at him and expect him to gather her meaning on his own.

“What will you do with all this extra cash you’ve been raking in?” He dipped the other half of his biscuit in his teacup and ignored the question she weren’t asking him, and the question she already had. “Take a holiday to fucking Mars? You can afford to build your own starship at this point, yeah.”

“That’s the thing about holidays,” Marie said. “No matter how extended, they eventually end and your life is still there waiting for you.”

“Since I’ve never taken a bloody holiday,” Alfie said, “I wouldn’t fucking know.”

Marie never did nothing so undignified as roll her eyes, but it were a close thing this time, weren’t it.

Gone longer than expected, Tommy, to the point where Alfie half suspected Churchill’s man had abducted him from Margate altogether. While he waited he took the opportunity to probe Beryl further on the doings of Camden Town’s Jewish community when it came to Oswald Mosley. Distrustful enough still she wouldn’t get into many specifics, Beryl did let on that her son might be involved, yeah, and that there was a healthy contingent of Communists among the lot.

Everything ached, leaving him more than a little aggravated with the world. He’d been cutting back on the morphine over the past several days to the point where he only really needed the stuff at night. The cough was nearly gone and his mind was clearer, but without the morphine’s cushion he was left at the mercy of his creaky joints again. He couldn’t be certain, given his evenings were still dulled by the drug, but he hadn’t heard a peep from Tommy at night since the incident in the lavatory. Perhaps he’d taken to ignoring his ghosts, or maybe they’d abandoned him at last. Most likely, though, the answer lay with the tablets.

The sun was hanging low in the sky by time Tommy returned from his meeting. Alfie watched over the spine of his book while he hung his coat in the closet and then crossed through the sitting room to the balcony without a word, a subdued air about him. He smoked two cigarettes in quick succession and Alfie left him to it -- he’d come in when he was good and ready. Spent a long bloody time out there, Tommy, but when he opened the balcony doors again there was something set in his expression that might’ve been uncertain when he’d first appeared.

Alfie waited him out while he sank into his usual chair, eyeing the chess board between them, abandoned mid-game when his cab had arrived earlier that afternoon.

“Was it your move or mine?” he asked.

“Hmm. Yours, I think.” Alfie didn’t actually have the first idea whose turn it had been, because they’d both been too distracted by the impending meeting to give the game any real attention.

Tommy moved a rook apparently at random and sat back again.

“So what’d he have to say, this Tory’s lackey?”

Tommy frowned down at the board as if he was waiting for Alfie’s response before he’d speak, so Alfie made his answering move. Captured another of his pawns.

“Wasn’t a lackey,” he said finally, a pensive line between his eyes.

Colour him astonished. “The man himself? Came to fucking Margate?”

“All the way here to fucking Margate.”

“What’d you tell him ‘bout where you been since the rally?”

Tommy picked up a knight, set it back again. “He already knew.”

“Fucking hell. ‘Course he did.” Whatever else Winston Churchill might’ve had to say about the matter of Bedlam and how he’d got himself there, Tommy failed to elaborate, yeah. He smelled of tobacco smoke and whiskey, and under it a definite whiff of strong Cuban cigar. “Right. Right. Well, he have anything of use to contribute, since he came all this way himself?”

Tommy shifted a pawn, a treading-water sort of move, his mind clearly back in that pub. “Mosley’s planning a series of marches in support of the B.U.F. Starting off in London, then in Birmingham, Manchester, wherever else he thinks he can drum up a crowd.”

“Logical next step from his rallies, I suppose,” Alfie said. “But it occurs to me, right, that it’s easier to heckle and bother blokes who parade themselves down the open street all dressed alike. No bottlenecks at the auditorium door, harder for his heavies to control the popular reception, yeah.”

Tommy’s eyes met his finally, a speculative spark there. He leaned over the chess board and when he did, Alfie caught a glimpse of the black weight of a holstered gun under his left arm.

“You tell your man Churchill you mean to return to the shelter of Sir Oswald’s wings?”

“Yeah.” Tommy watched Alfie take another of his pawns.

“He have an opinion on the matter?”

“I’ll report to him directly this time. Circumvent Special Branch.”

“And the odds Mosley’s pals there told him you were spying on him?”

“Churchill claims they haven’t.” Tommy rubbed at his mouth. If they’d been playing poker, that was what you’d call a tell, weren’t it.

“And you’re just gonna trust his word on it? Or theirs?”

“Not sure I have a choice. Even if Mosley knows, he needs the support of my constituents and my backing in the House. And he’d... find it a challenge, if he knew.”

There was an undercurrent to his words Alfie weren’t sure how to read. The thread of fear that had always been present any time Tommy discussed Mosley had tangled up and thickened like thorny brambles around his ankles as he spoke.

“You mean he’d get off on it.” Tommy’s head came up, startled. “Yeah, I know the type. Knowing you was working against him would only make him want to own you more.”

Tommy swallowed around whatever he’d decided not to say aloud and stared down at the chessboard as if it held any answers at all beyond the inevitable conclusion of their current match. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe so. But I don’t see a better option than to play along.”

“That’s the thing about this kind of game, mate,” Alfie said. “While you’re playing along, he’s playing you. How far are you willing to let him?”

Tommy’s eyes had gone hard and blank as pennies. “As far as is necessary.”

“You sure about that?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Tommy bit off, then stood abruptly and disappeared through the balcony doors again.

Right.

The bottle of gin. The gold cufflinks and collar pin. The cigarette case, and now the gun. Either Tommy had a greater talent for thievery than Alfie’d ever given him credit for or he’d conned his way into them. Given his less than charming interactions with the bloke at the library, the cabbie, and more recently Beryl, it seemed a stretch. So when he came back in from his stew on the balcony to resume their half-arsed chess match, Alfie gave him a few moves to settle in before he spoke again.

“It struck me, yeah, that a decent sort of host would’ve lent you a couple shillings for cab fare this afternoon, mate.” By way of response Tommy took one of Alfie’s bishops, which distracted him from his inquiry for a short while until he’d set things to rights again on the board. “Hmm. You sweet talking cabbies now? I know you’re good for it, still got that big house of yours to hock, right.”

“I’ve no need of a loan.” Now he was just drawing it out for his own fucking amusement, weren’t he. Seen right through the gesture of generosity Alfie’d extended.

“Right, right. Rob a bank while you were out, did you? Or are you sticking up old ladies in alleys now, Thomas? Only ask so’s I know what alibi to give the coppers when they trace you back here, you know.”

Seemed content to leave Alfie’s curiousity unsatisfied, Tommy, but then the corner of his mouth turned up and he relented. “My sister wired me funds,” he said. “So you’ve no reason to invent any alibis.”

“Right. Well then. Next time we venture into town, mate, you can cover the cab.”

“Fair enough,” Tommy said, and returned his attention to the game.

_Who says he’s going somewhere? _

The morning after he’d held Tommy down while Marie stuck him full of phenobarbital, he’d told Tommy he’d get him wherever he wanted to go. But then Tommy’d stayed, and Alfie hadn’t thought on the matter again. Hadn’t considered anything beyond the present moment. It was how he’d lived since coming to Margate, since Tommy’d refused to guarantee he didn’t have any more moments to plan for. Even when he’d talked about murdering Oswald Mosley -- a task that obviously would have required he be in geographical proximity to the man -- Alfie hadn’t wrangled with the reality of it. Sure, he’d been serious enough about the need to snuff out Mosley’s movement, dig it out at the roots; but at the same time he’d been behaving like it was all theoreticals, everything they’d discussed since Tommy started talking again. Like the thing might be accomplished through talk alone. But here Tommy was with a gun on him and the cash to fuck off whenever he bloody well wanted.

But he hadn’t yet left, had he.

“So while you’re reporting to him, doing all the work of sticking by Mosley’s weasley side, what’s the great Mr. Churchill offered in return?”

Tommy studied Alfie for a moment, seemed to come to a decision. “After the war a Defense Regulations act was drafted granting emergency powers to the government. It’s been revised several times and never passed.”

“And?”

“Several of the drafts allow for… a greater restriction of civil liberties, for the purpose of public safety.”

“You mean tossing blokes in the clink for saying things the Crown don’t like.”

“They already jail Communists on drummed up charges,” Tommy said. “And anyone else they fancy getting out of the way for a bit. This would formalize political internment without bothering with the trial. The only difference would be what sort of man was lifted.”

“What’ll it take to get that kind of shite passed in the House?” Alfie asked. “Can’t expect Labour to go along with it, can you? And once people understand the implications, right--”

“Aim it at the Communists and you’ll get Tory support, and people like Mosley will back it.”

“Back the very thing Churchill’s planning to use against him?”

“He’d never imagine being subjected to such a law,” Tommy scoffed. “His money and title no defense, put away like a common man? ”

“It’ll take more than some Bolshevik-hating arseholes though or they’d’ve used it during the General Strike,” Alfie said. Tommy just nodded. “You think they’ll be given reason. Another war?”

“Churchill believes so,” Tommy said. Whatever he believed about the matter, he kept to himself. _Civil wounds plough’d up with neighbours' sword_, he’d said in the cab as he fell to pieces. _Hell is coming for us right here in Britain_.

“That’s a weapon liable to catch all sorts in the shrapnel, innit.” Tommy took one of Alfie’s knights and he must’ve lost track of the situation, because suddenly the other man was mere moves away from blocking in his queen. “But you’ll go along with it, shrapnel and all, as long as it snares Mosley, won’t you, Tom.”

Didn’t deny it, Tommy. Just sat back and waited for Alfie to make his counter move.

After the evening meal Tommy disappeared, which weren’t so unusual, right, but Alfie caught himself listening around the normal house-sounds -- Beryl doing the dishes in the kitchen, Marie puttering around the place doing whatever she got up to when she weren’t prodding him with questions -- listening, yeah, for… well. When he stopped and asked himself what exactly he was listening for the first answer was _not a fucking thing_ but underneath that was something else, something tensed up. Waiting for the sound of breaking glass, maybe. It didn’t come, whatever he was waiting to hear, but his straining for anything out of the ordinary did lead him to pinpoint Tommy’s location, from the low murmur coming down the hall. Too close and vivid to be originating from his room, which meant he was on the telephone again. Alfie weren’t above a little casual spying and this was his own fucking house after all, wasn’t it, so he found some excuse to head towards his bedroom, which just happened to take him past his office. And if he leaned on his cane and took a more hobbling pace than he might’ve strictly required, well, it was only fair, lingering pneumonia and all.

“I know. I’ll hear it when I get back,” Tommy said to whoever was on the other end of the line, a soft warmth to his voice that was wholly unfamiliar, though the thread of strain underneath weren’t anything new. “Not long. Yeah. You listen to Lizzie, eh? And look after your sister.”

Could have paused outside the door and listened to the rest, couldn’t he, but he didn’t. Just picked up the pace and occupied himself in his room for a bit until he heard the door to the office open and after a little while, the sound of the radio. By time he made it back out to the sitting room Tommy was nose-deep in one of his books. They took in the news without comment and once the music started up again Alfie peered at Tommy over his spectacles, forefinger marking his place in his own volume.

“Hmm. Still worried about your kids?”

Tommy didn’t so much as frown or even look up from his reading but all his lines had gone tense, which was answer enough in itself. “Lizzie will watch out for them.” Edgy about it despite the surety behind his words, the doubt not about his wife but everything else. His boy had been used to control him once, after all, it was a lever his enemies would know got results. “I made a call.”

“Did you.” But he didn’t go on. “And your black cat?” Careful, careful. No weight to it, tossed off like litter.

“What about him?”

“Your wife said he was a friend.”

Tommy stared off into the distance, book forgotten. “Yeah.” Alfie thought that would be it, the only acknowledgement he’d get, but Tommy rubbed at his mouth and then shook his head. “We’re kin,” he continued. “Spent summers travelling with his people when I was a kid. His mam… she’d look after us. Didn’t have much but there was always enough to go round when I ended up at their fire. Took me in sometimes, when…” He shook his head again. “Couple summers me and Johnny were thick as thieves. Before… before things... before me mum died. After that we didn’t see them as much. She would have taken us on top her own five, Johnny’s mam.”

Took Alfie a moment to press on, shocked as he was to have gotten that much. “Why didn’t she, then?”

Tommy smoothed his palms against his thighs, still watching nothing. Then his gaze at the nothing sharpened and fixed in a way that had become familiar, though it hadn’t happened since before Alfie’d got sick, not that he’d witnessed himself anyhow. “Too many mouths to feed, I suspect,” Tommy said. But that weren’t what he really thought about it, weren’t the true reason.

Fuck. Who was he seeing this time? Didn’t seem to be his wife, though Alfie didn’t know why the hell he was so certain. Something about the way he’d gone still and watchful, like he’d found himself in a room with a rabid dog.

“So why betray you? Money?”

“I don’t fucking know.” Braced for a blow now, shoulders curled inward, a thousand miles from the cozy shabbiness of Alfie’s sitting room.

“But you’re sure it’s him.”

If he hadn’t known better, if he hadn’t known about the ghosts, the bad blood behind Tommy’s words might’ve seemed aimed solely at his traitor. “Not sure of anything.”

It was like carrying on a conversation with someone on the telephone, their attention split between you and some other bloke who was chattering in their ear. And now Alfie knew it weren’t the first wife, because while there’d always been more than a touch of terror about Tommy when she was around, there’d never been this loathing, even when he’d hinted she appeared to him as a dead thing. None of his other visitors had provoked anything near the hostility that radiated off him now, even as he carried on as if Alfie were the only one in the room with him. Alfie weighed asking who it was he saw, but whether from the distraction or because he needed to get it off his chest, Tommy was actually answering his current line of questioning, right, and if he veered from it now chances were good he’d get nothing more about the issue.

“You seemed pretty fucking sure the other day. When it came to keeping him away from your kids.” That was the problem, weren’t it -- Tommy and his kids. Was the threat real, or an echo of that earlier time, when his son was snatched by the priest? He’d been paranoid, Lizzie Shelby had said. And in the lavatory he’d been mumbling about his son’s return. “You got more than the word of a ghost?”

Struggling to hide how unnerved he was, Tommy, whether it was Alfie’s own question or something demanded of him by the haunt. Either way he failed to answer.

“What will you do?”

“I will look him in the eye,” Tommy said finally, “and one way or the other, I’ll know.”

“And when will that be, mate?” For all the talk of plans and schemes, he hadn’t given a hint about when he’d actually be leaving and now Marie had put the thought in his head it had eaten at Alfie all day, to the point where here he was, asking direct.

Tommy straightened, pulling his attention away from the interloper to focus on Alfie for the first time in the whole bloody conversation. “Am I no longer welcome here?”

It was so uncharacteristically on the mark that Alfie could do little more than stare back at him, gathering the shreds of his interrogation and searching through them for a proper reply. And he came back to the call Tommy’d made that night, talking to his son. Longing and the hesitation of a lie in his voice as he’d said he wouldn’t be long.

“Maybe this Johnny ain’t the only one you need to look in the eye, hm? Maybe the real question is what’s stopping you from just fucking doing it.”

Tommy stood and turned his back and whether it was on Alfie or his ghost or fucking both at once it was hard to tell the difference.

“Nothing’s fucking stopping me,” he said.

But it weren’t a bloody answer, that. Weren't an answer at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started posting this a year ago! Wow. Thanks for being patient while I was distracted and then stuck for a bit. Hope this was worth the wait. Let me know what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> From the research I did, the understanding of mental illness and the accepted treatments of the 1920s appeared pretty dire. If I really screw something up, please let me know.
> 
> apologies, due to recent events re: 3rd party apps, this fic will remain locked for the near future, so you'll need to be logged in to view any updates.


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